Irn-Bru has topped a ranking of the UK’s favourite World Cup themed adverts, outperforming official sponsors, global sports brands, and celebrity heavy campaigns.
The Scottish soft drink brand’s Susan Boyle-fronted football anthem, “Made in Scotland from Girders”, scored 5.9 stars in System1’s ranking of 2026 World Cup advertising, the highest score available on the platform for long-term brand building potential. The result placed Irn-Bru ahead of Lay’s, Lego, Guinness, BBC, EE, Mastercard, McDonald’s Brazil, Adidas, and Volkswagen Brazil.
System1 tested 130 World Cup themed adverts across the UK, US, Brazil, Europe, and Australia. The company’s Test Your Ad platform measures emotional response and assigns Star Ratings from 1.0 to 5.9 based on predicted long-term brand growth. This year, 22 adverts achieved a score of four stars or higher, compared with only two during the 2022 men’s World Cup.
Irn-Bru ranked first despite not being an official tournament partner. Lay’s “Bandwagon” campaign in the US scored 5.1 stars, Lego’s “Everyone Wants a Piece” scored 4.9, and Guinness’s “Singing Pints” scored 4.8. The BBC’s tournament coverage announcement and EE’s “Yes Boys” also scored 4.8.
Adidas made the top 11 with “Backyard Legends”, scoring 4.5 stars. Nike’s “Rip The Script”, a six minute blockbuster that had generated more than 67 million YouTube views, did not make the top ranking.
Andrew Tindall, chief growth officer for advertising at System1, said: “This year’s World Cup was a reminder that great advertising isn’t about hiring the biggest celebrity, it’s about telling the best story. The winning ads used fame well, but they won because they paired it with humour, cultural relevance and strong creative execution.”
He added: “The challenge is that too many brands are still leaving memory on the table. On average, one in five viewers couldn’t recall who the ad was for. That’s a problem.”
The ranking gives weight to a familiar but often neglected discipline in major event marketing: fame is commercially useful only when it attaches to the brand. Official sponsorship can buy category exclusivity, broadcast adjacency, hospitality, pitch side visibility, and tournament assets. None of those guarantees that viewers will enjoy the creative, remember the advertiser, or connect the campaign to the product.
The 2026 World Cup is one of the largest advertising battlegrounds of the year. FIFA partners and tournament sponsors are using deep media budgets, while challenger brands and non-sponsors are using social video, humour, national identity, talent, and distinctive brand assets to compete without formal rights. That creates a crowded field in which many campaigns use the same shorthand: famous footballers, fan rituals, dressing rooms, stadium noise, and tournament nostalgia.
Irn-Bru’s result points to the value of brand fluency. The campaign draws on long established associations around Scottishness, irreverence, humour, and the “Made in Scotland from Girders” line. Its celebrity use is culturally specific rather than generic, placing Susan Boyle inside a brand world with recognisable codes. Viewers are therefore more likely to remember it as an Irn-Bru advert, not simply as another tournament film with familiar faces.
The finding connects closely with the mental availability debate in marketing. A recent launch of a mental availability diagnostic tool focused on whether brands come to mind in relevant buying situations. World Cup advertising tests the same principle at high speed. A brand must be noticed, enjoyed, and remembered in a cluttered cultural moment where many advertisers borrow from the same football imagery.
The commercial risk is that attention is mistaken for effectiveness. A high view count can reflect media weight, distribution, social sharing, paid amplification, or celebrity curiosity. Brand growth depends on whether the advertiser is remembered and whether positive emotion is attached to the correct brand. System1’s finding that one in five viewers could not recall the advertised brand shows how easily expensive creative can lose commercial value.
Marketing teams are making these decisions under tighter budget scrutiny. Analysis of how AI pilots are being funded from existing marketing budgets showed how quickly spend can be reallocated before returns are settled. Large event campaigns therefore need to justify not only reach and cultural presence, but memory, brand attribution, and sales contribution.
The World Cup also broadens the definition of a campaign. Brands are combining hero films, social platforms, retail activations, creator work, merchandise, fan experiences, and sponsorship rights. That gives marketing teams more ways to build salience, but it also increases complexity. A campaign can appear everywhere and still fail if its distinctive brand assets are weak or if the creative idea belongs more to football than to the advertiser.
Irn-Bru’s performance shows that strong creative memory can compete with formal sponsorship status. In a tournament crowded with global budgets and familiar football tropes, the strongest work gives viewers a story they enjoy and a brand they can still name afterwards.
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