The biggest soccer tournament comes around every four years. We made sure brands didn't miss it.

Last summer’s soccer tournament was the biggest sporting event to touch US soil in a generation. The last time it had been hosted here was 1994 and expectations were high among fans of the beautiful game. And the world showed up. Over 6.8 million fans attended the 104 matches in person while billions watched along on TV, globally. 

It meant a lot of goals, upsets, controversial calls, wild celebrations, heartbreak, joy, and of course, snacks. Few watch parties can be called a success without the right food. And with so many tuning in across the continent, the soccer tournament represented a golden opportunity for CPG brands, one where awareness, intent, and purchase behavior all aligned. 

The kind of moment Instacart Ads Studio, our full-serve creative marketing offering, was built for. Designed to help CPG brands of all sizes turn grocery shopping into brand-building moments, Instacart Ads Studio leverages Instacart’s first-party purchase data and our award-winning creative studio, Local Produce, to build campaigns that capture the moment. 

Instacart Ads Studio executed a geo-targeted dynamic campaign, a national, full-funnel integration in Canada, a suite of custom branded campaigns spanning categories, and a social content push that caught fire — hitting over a million views on TikTok and driving fans to a shoppable landing page. 

Seven cities. One playbook. Game day, delivered.

Instacart Ads Studio offers dynamic integration campaigns, where we work brands into Instacart-led campaigns that geo-targets in real-time, keying in on events like weather or events. They provide a great way for brands to reach consumers in a culturally relevant way without building a bespoke campaign from scratch. 

For the soccer tournament, we targeted the US host cities the day of kick off, delivering push notifications and social media posts to the zip codes in and around each of the seven host cities.

This campaign generated 30 million impressions for the sponsoring brands, putting them front and center in a timely campaign that showed up right when fans were making their game day food plans. 

Going national in the true north

With only two host cities in Canada, we went broader to help brands reach Canadian soccer fans. Instead of city-level targeting, we rolled out a national, full-funnel seasonal integration for three sponsoring brands, generating 22 million impressions. 

By going national, Instacart Ads Studio was able to adjust the playbook. Same cultural moment, same goal — just a different route to get there. Full funnel, national reach, brands present throughout the consideration journey.

Brand stories, told their way

In addition to Instacart's big campaigns we worked with brands to build their own custom programs, where their brand could be the hero, their way. 

The result was a ton of buy-in from our brand partners spanning from household essentials to instant noodles to global spirits. In total, these campaigns generated 174 million impressions as brands jumped on board.  

The range was striking. Brands from completely different aisles all found ways to make the tournament part of their story, proving the soccer tournament was a big enough purchase occasion for brands of all kinds to fit. 

A major ice cream portfolio came to Ads Studio with a question: we have eight sub-brands — can we make the tournament format work for us? The answer was yes, and what followed was one of the more creative executions we've run.

Instacart Ads Studio helped design a tournament-style flavor bracket featuring eight ice cream sub-brands. Instacart consumers "voted" with their carts — the most-ordered flavors each week advanced to the next round, just like a real tournament. The bracket ran the length of the tournament, promoted across homepage placements, email, push notifications, and onsite media.

At the end of the tournament, a winning brand was crowned and customers received a special offer — a moment of payoff that tied the whole arc together.

The results were significant. The campaign drove 95 million impressions. Not only that, these were valuable consumers to reach for the brands. 85% were new-to-brand, 67% were new to the category, and 70% were incremental, meaning they had not previously been reached through the brand's other auction-based advertising. 

In other words, this wasn't just reach — it was genuinely new reach. The campaign found people who had never heard of these brands before and introduced them through an experience tied to something they were already paying attention to. That's what a great custom campaign looks like.

Going viral — the social campaign that hit 1M+ views

If you were on social media during the tournament, you saw it: international visitors discovering American grocery stores and completely losing their minds. The novelty items. The portion sizes. The flavor innovations. The sheer, glorious excess of American snack food. It went viral. Over and over again.

We saw the conversation happening and decided to get in front of it, putting out a casting call to CPG brands to help us build the ultimate "Welcome to America" collection — the flavors, the innovations, the only-in-America products that would genuinely blow international visitors away. The brief was intentionally open. We wanted brands to be proud of what they brought.

The response was fantastic, with over a dozen parent companies joining and bringing 65 individual brands into the mix. The Instacart Ads Studio got to work getting the content up and the response was immediate — nearly 50,000 views on Instagram and more than one million views on TikTok, all pointing to a shoppable landing page where people could actually buy the products they were seeing.

Across four activations, Instacart Ads Studio generated more than 220 million impressions and drove results for our brand partners. And while the next soccer tournament is four years away, the next big cultural moment is not. Whether it's another sports tournament, a cultural trend, or something nobody has predicted yet — we have the playbook built and the know how to execute it.

Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes.

This post contains third-party claims and descriptions provided by the featured third party brand. Instacart does not make any representation as to the accuracy or suitability of any of the information provided herein by the featured brand.

Looking to advertise with Instacart? Get started here.