Super Bowl, World Cup, Olympics: Putting Fan Opportunities in Focus

How to make a lasting impact when it matters most

The Super Bowl, the World Cup, and the Olympics are three of the loudest reminders we have that fandom isn’t a marketing layer, but the product itself. Different sports, different rhythms, different stakes … but the same underlying question for every brand orbiting these moments: how do you earn fans (and keep them)?

Over the last year on Fandom Unpacked, we talked to leaders across sports, Broadway, travel, media and venues—aka, the people responsible for filling seats and keeping audiences coming back. When we stitched those conversations together in our Year-End Review episode, a few truths kept surfacing.

Here are the takeaways I keep thinking about as the world’s biggest fan moments approach:

Build audiences by expanding the tent, even when it scares your CFO

If you want growth, you have to be willing to invite people in before they’re “ready.” That’s true for a World Cup host city, an Olympic sponsor and yes, an NFL team trying to turn a casual viewer into a repeat customer.

Nicole Kankam of the U.S. Tennis Association said it plainly when she described launching Fan Week—free access, big investment, real internal worry and then the payoff: “Two-thirds of the audience said, ‘I’m coming back for main draw.’”

That’s the bet: not “free vs. paid,” but on-ramp vs. no on-ramp. The Super Bowl is basically the world’s most successful on-ramp—ads, halftime, party culture—where fandom starts as participation and often turns into attachment.

And Jonathan Linden of Round Room Live framed the same dynamic from a different angle: If fans can’t get to the thing, bring the thing to the fans, which is the entire logic behind the Formula 1 Exhibition.

Legacy isn’t your advantage unless you can reinvent it in public

The World Cup and Olympics run on legacy, history, tradition and national pride. But legacy brands can get trapped in their own mythology.

Amy Wigler at PBS nailed the tension: “I want people to love us for who we are now.” And Jim Moseley at Feld Entertainment described the tightrope brands have to walk: They must honor nostalgia but also deliver something new.

So, if you’re a legacy brand heading into one of these mega moments, the question isn’t “How do we remind people of the good old days?” It’s: “How do we make today worthy of becoming someone else’s good old days?”

Fans can smell a money grab, so don’t treat authenticity like a campaign

The most consistent theme across our interviews wasn’t technology. It wasn’t pricing. It was trust. Melissa Anelli of BroadwayCon backed it up from the fan-event world: “Fans can spot authenticity a mile away.”

This matters because the Super Bowl, Olympics and World Cup create a gravitational pull for opportunistic marketing. Everyone wants in. Fans know when you’re showing up for the photo—and when you’re building something with them.

Tech is everywhere, but the winners will use it to enable humanity—not replace it

We all feel the AI subtext now. Every organization is aware they “have to do something,” but most aren’t sure what that something is. Janette Roush of Brand USA offered one of the clearest pictures of where this goes: With a personal chatbot on your phone, the new challenge becomes, essentially, how your brand surfaces inside those models.

Andrew Recinos of Tessitura gave my favorite guardrail: “Technology should not be replacing meaningful human interaction. It should be enabling it.” In other words: yes, optimize discovery. Yes, personalize. But don’t automate the soul out of the experience. The biggest fan moments are still built on emotion, not efficiency.

The in-venue experience is the next battleground (and marketers need to own it)

A lot of brands still act like “the venue” is operations’ job. Fans don’t experience org charts. They experience friction. Elisa Padilla of the New York Red Bulls described it as “street-to-seat.”

Oak View Group’s Tina Heaney urged marketers to stop obsessing over the show and start studying the audience: “Don’t focus on the show or the game, focus on the fans.”

If you’re heading into an Olympic or a World Cup year, “fan experience” can’t just mean content and creative. It’s bathrooms, entry, wayfinding, water, lines, signage, staff energy … these are the things fans remember when they decide whether to come back.

Show up. Because the truth is in the stands, not the spreadsheet

The most enduring advice from the year was analog: go see it. Andrew Harvell from Southwest Airlines said it directly: Get out of headquarters and watch the operation firsthand because it creates empathy that no dashboard can. And Anelli described her own ritual: walking the floor mid-event, watching people connect, and letting that be the fuel for the next year.

That’s the throughline I’d carry into any “big moment” strategy: don’t just market the experience: experience the experience.

The Super Bowl, World Cup and Olympics don’t win because they’re big. They’re big because they’ve mastered the basics: access, identity, story, trust and the lived reality of the fan experience.

Everything else is just amplification.