The World Cup will create a rush of interest, as consumers prepare for the world’s biggest sporting event next month. But Vic Peopall, Client Success Director at Epsilon, argues that not every retail brand should expect the same outcome from showing up. 

Getting match ready

With the World Cup nearly upon us, new data from Epsilon’s Match Ready: World Cup Audiences Report found that 71% of UK consumers expect to alter their spending habits around the tournament. For retailers and the brands that sell through them, the question is not whether demand will shift, but how differently it will land depending on what you sell.

Much of that uplift is concentrated in categories where demand sits close to the moment. For snacks, soft drinks and other food and beverage brands, particularly those in HFSS categories that face advertising restrictions at other times of year, well-timed brand activity during the World Cup can translate directly into sales.

But the tournament is not only a moment for the obvious categories. Brands with less immediate connections to football could still tap into what will be one of the year’s largest cultural events. The difference is that their returns are unlikely to land at once and judging them as though they should is where value gets lost.

Interest in higher-value items tends to begin much earlier, as consumers invest in their viewing experience. More than two-thirds say they are considering upgrades, with nearly one in five planning to purchase a new TV or projector before a ball is kicked. 

A similar pattern appears in adjacent categories such as garden furniture and outdoor cooking, where the World Cup acts as both a conversion trigger and a longer-term demand driver.

Conversion drivers & attribution

What matters is recognising that two dynamics are happening at the same time. Some conversions during the tournament will be the result of consideration that started weeks or months earlier, as consumers researched, compared and shortlisted. Elsewhere, returns must be assessed with a more well-rounded view of influence, as opposed to just conversion impact.

Campaign activation now helps close that existing intent, and it captures new interest from consumers not yet in market, some of whom will act quickly while others convert later during summer sales, a promotional window or an event like Black Friday. That interest does not disappear, but sits with the consumer until the moment, the budget or the offer aligns.

Many campaigns risk being undervalued because the focus is towards short-term conversion. Those in longer purchase cycles will struggle to prove impact using the same metrics. A campaign that builds demand but converts months later will appear to underperform if measured within a narrow attribution window.

The more useful question is whether a campaign moved the behaviours that lead to purchase. For shorter-cycle categories, that may still mean sales volume or basket size. For longer-cycle categories, success is more likely to surface as increased product searches, repeat site visits, or a measurable shift in brand consideration, all of which feed higher quality demand heading into Q4. 

Over a longer window, that activity should translate into more durable measures of impact: extended ROAS, in-store visits, category-level uplift, or the acquisition and retention of more valuable customers.

Connecting the moments that matter

None of that measurement holds together, however, if you cannot connect the moments that matter across time, device and channel. 

Exposure during a live match may happen on one screen, research may happen days later on a phone, and purchase may occur weeks after that in-store or during a sale. If your reporting treats those as unrelated events, you will systematically under-credit the activity that created the demand.

This is why identity must be part of the plan from the outset, rather than a bolt-on after performance disappoints. A consistent person-level view allows brands to move beyond channel-level reporting and understand how campaigns influence real people over time, linking early exposure to eventual outcomes instead of treating each touchpoint in isolation. It turns measurement from a snapshot into a continuum, which is the only framing that makes sense when purchase cycles vary by category.

The practical implication is that World Cup campaigns should not be judged against a single, simplistic conversion expectation, even when they run at the same time and reach similar audiences. Some will convert quickly, others will build value over months, and many will do both depending on where the consumer already was in their journey. 

Retailers and brands that extract the most value will be those that plan for that difference, defining in advance what they expect to influence, how that influence will show up, and how they will prove it over an attribution window that matches the category’s reality.