Notes From a World Cup June

Two weeks into the World Cup, and the studio has quietly reorganized itself around the match schedule. There is a projector in the big room that nobody officially approved. Stand-ups migrated to avoid the 9 a.m. kickoffs. Half the team has adopted second and third teams based on ancestry, spite, or aesthetics, and our group chat has produced better sports writing than most outlets I pay for. Bay Area FC fans, transplants in Colombia shirts, and one stubborn Denmark loyalist, all in one production meeting.

I have spent the past two weeks split between client shoots and pure spectating, and since we are at the year's halfway mark, this seems like the moment to write down what this strange, wonderful June is teaching us.

The whole continent is a location

As a production person, what strikes me most is the scale of the staging. Sixteen host cities across three countries, each broadcast window a different light, altitude, and architecture. The tournament is incidentally producing the most expensive portrait of North America ever filmed, and it is changing how briefs read already. Clients who spent years asking for placeless, globally neutral footage are suddenly asking for specificity: this street, this heat, this crowd. The tournament made place feel valuable again.

We shot a small film for a client in one host city during the opening week, nothing tournament-related, and the ambient energy did half our art department's job. Flags in windows, strangers watching phones together outside bars, restaurant TVs angled toward the sidewalk. You cannot fabricate that texture, and for six weeks nobody has to.

The best brand work is at the edges, again

Claire wrote in April that most brands should plan for a World Cup summer rather than make a World Cup ad, and two weeks of evidence says she undersold it. The center of the tournament is a wall of sponsor sameness: enormous budgets, interchangeable montages, the same drone shot of the same stadium. I could not assign most of them to the correct brand at gunpoint.

The work people are actually sharing lives at the edges. The neighborhood restaurant chain that publishes its match-day menu as a lovingly designed broadsheet. The retailer whose store hours flex with the schedule and says so with wit. The brands reacting to actual match moments within the hour, in their own voice, because someone pre-cleared the machinery in May. Small, fast, and specific is beating enormous and general in every feed I look at. This has been our thesis for four years, and it has never had a louder demonstration.

Mid-year, honestly

Since this is also the halfway post for 2026, a quick accounting against what we said in January. The booked-into-Q4 calendar held, and the saying-no discipline is being tested weekly, exactly as Daniel predicted. The agentic commerce work has moved from research to a first real client engagement, faster than we expected. And the craft thesis, that taste and judgment are the scarce resources when production is abundant, has gone from our pitch to the industry's conventional wisdom, which means we need to find the next unfashionable thing to be right about. We have candidates. Ask us in January.

What we did not predict was how good this summer would feel. The last few years of this industry have been vertiginous: tools changing monthly, disciplines dissolving, everyone renegotiating what their expertise means. And then a hundred million people gather around some matches, and the oldest truths in our business hold their shape. Shared moments still beat fragmented ones. Feelings still beat specifications. Craft still reads from across the room, or across a stadium.

The final is July 19 in New Jersey. The projector stays up until then. After that, we will take the lessons, and probably the Denmark loyalist's apology, into the second half of the year.