Black adhesive tape. That was FIFA’s secret weapon for the 2026 World Cup. The policy called ‘clean stadiums’ requires hiding any brand that has not paid to be an official sponsor, so tournament staff went package by package through the VIP and press areas covering up the Heinz name: ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce, and relish, all censored with a little black strip as if they were guarding a state secret.
Heinz did not take long to respond. The brand posted its own covered packages against soccer field backgrounds and wrote what no one at FIFA wanted to read: ‘You can cover the name, but the taste gives us away’. The post racked up thousands of interactions within hours. But the story did not end there: Levi’s, whose stadium in Santa Clara was renamed ‘San Francisco Bay Area Stadium’ for the tournament, appeared in the comments with a simple ‘Wow, you too?’. Heinz replied: ‘We’ll get through this together’. Gillette, with its 60.000 seats covered with blue tape in Foxborough, added its own campaign using artificial intelligence to simulate that it was shaving foam covering its logo.
In short: FIFA spent adhesive tape so no one would see these brands during the World Cup, and ended up handing them the most viral advertising campaign of the tournament.
