The 2026 FIFA World Cup is already setting records before a single match has been played. With 48 teams, 104 games, and matches hosted across the US, Mexico, and Canada, this is the most expansive edition of the tournament in history, and the most commercially significant for North American advertisers. Fox projected at least 15 million viewers per US match, with 150 million combined across the full tournament. Sponsorship packages for premium in-game inventory reached well into the eight figures.
Tentpole events — the Super Bowl, World Cup, and other cultural moments that command mass simultaneous viewership — are among the few remaining places where that kind of audience concentration still exists. The good news is that the landscape is changing for advertisers who've historically sat out tentpole events because they’re too expensive, too locked in, and too hard to measure. The inventory is becoming more accessible, and the planning models that used to require committing an entire year's budget in a single upfront negotiation are giving way to something more flexible.
Live events have always commanded a premium because they deliver something increasingly rare: a large, attentive audience watching in real time. Appointment viewing has eroded almost everywhere except sports and major cultural moments. That scarcity is what drives eight-figure sponsorship packages and sold-out upfront inventory. But it's also what makes live events worth a harder look right now, even for brands that haven't historically participated.
That’s because the scale of the live event market has expanded significantly as streaming has extended what "live" actually means. An event that once lived on a single linear broadcast now distributes across network TV, CTV apps, Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) platforms, and streaming services simultaneously. WARC estimates the World Cup alone could inject an additional $10.5 billion into the global ad market.
When you apply that pattern to the full calendar of live tentpoles, the category represents one of the most significant concentrations of engaged audiences in media.
As viewers migrate to streaming platforms and mid-market brands demand flexibility, tentpole inventory is increasingly becoming biddable.
For most of modern advertising history, enterprise brands negotiated packages for premium tentpole inventory at upfronts, locked in their placements, and renewed them year over year. New entrants faced a closed market as the same advertisers returned because they had already secured their spots for the following year before anyone else could compete.
That model is shifting because the audience moved. According to Inscape, streaming accounted for close to 60% of total TV viewing time, while traditional cable and satellite dipped below 28%. Providers who don't move tentpole inventory into streaming environments are chasing a shrinking audience, and most of them know it.
The pressure isn't coming only from the audience side. Publishers and streamers are actively pursuing mid-market and challenger brands, and that pursuit is forcing a change in how inventory gets transacted.
Enterprise buyers will always anchor the upfront, but they represent a ceiling. Mid-market brands represent growth, and to win that business, publishers have to offer something the upfront model never could: flexibility.
Mid-market brands plan in shorter cycles (quarterly, rather than annually) because their budgets respond to business performance in real time. They're not going to commit to a fixed package a year out. Biddable inventory changes the economics of participation entirely. Teams can allocate dynamically, shifting toward placements that are demonstrably working as the event unfolds rather than locked into whatever was negotiated months before.
There's a common assumption that tentpole value is concentrated in the live game itself, but that’s not always the case. Sports podcasts, pre- and post-game programming, highlight content, and streaming-native formats around tentpole events consistently reach audiences that in-game buys don't, and they’re often more engaged.
The person following a sports podcast through an entire season is a different viewer than the one who tunes in only for the championship game. As I explored in an earlier piece on fragmented sports fandom, that surrounding content ecosystem — social, creator, audio, real-time community — is where fan identity actually lives between games. Brands that only buy the broadcast are meeting fans at one moment in a much longer conversation.
FAST platforms are an increasingly important part of that ecosystem. As subscription fatigue grows, free ad-supported streaming has become a meaningful reach vehicle for live sports-adjacent content, one that doesn't carry the CPM premium of in-game broadcast inventory.
The practical implication is that advertisers should plan around a full content ecosystem for tentpoles rather than just the broadcast window.
One of the persistent objections to tentpole investment is the measurement problem. How do you know whether the (often large) spend actually drove outcomes?
Incrementality testing is the most direct answer, and tentpole events are well-suited for it. The typical structure of a major event campaign — a significant ramp-up in budget around the event, followed by a natural taper — mirrors the test-and-holdout framework that incrementality requires. You're already scaling up and scaling down. The question is whether you're accurately measuring performance while you do it.
A brand investing seriously in CTV for the first time during a tentpole event has an opportunity to build a measurement layer into that investment from the start. Run an incrementality test during the spend-up period, use the taper as the holdout comparison, and come out the other side with a clear answer: did the CTV investment drive customers we wouldn't have acquired otherwise? That kind of business outcome data helps justify next year's tentpole budget and builds the case for the broader CTV investment over time.
The key is planning for it in advance. Incrementality tests require enough budget volume and clean design to produce reliable results, and they're much harder to retrofit after the campaign has already run.
Tentpole events compress timelines and raise the stakes for every decision. We help brands and agencies:
If your team is thinking ahead to the next major live event, we'd love to talk about what's possible. Reach out to get the conversation started.