For decades, watching a major sporting event was a single-screen experience, the family gathered in front of the TV, the announcer narrating, the entire country watching the same thing at the same time.
This ritual is not over, but it is no longer alone.
Today, before and after the game takes place on broadcast, a second layer runs on the fan’s cell phone, and this is where an increasing amount of attention and advertising investment is focused.
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This second layer is built by creators. They are the ones who comment on the play in real time, turn the referee’s error into a meme before the end of the first half, react to the goal with the emotion that the fan recognizes as their own. They do not compete with the transmission, they couple with it.
Fans watch the game on TV and experience the competition on the networks at the same time, without understanding the boundary between one thing and another.
The second screen became the protagonist
It was with this reading that we structured 2026 Convocados, a project that we launched at Play9 in partnership with Globo to follow the World Cup.
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The structure combines 26 creators with national reach at the forefront of the editorial narrative with a network of 2,000 micro and nano influencers spread across Brazil, managed by our platform, PlayNest.
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With the World Cup still underway, the project has already received more than 4.5 billion views and more than 67 thousand pieces of content published.
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From mass media to distribution
More than volume, these numbers show a change in behavior: there is a huge amount of attention available outside the main screen, and it is distributed among many voices instead of focusing on just one.
For the advertising market, this reorganizes the account. For a long time, advertising at a major sporting event meant buying mass media, the most expensive space, with the largest possible audience, during halftime of the game.
This model continues to be valid, but it started to share space with the logic of distribution: in addition to an insertion seen by millions, dozens or hundreds of creators talking to their specific audiences, each using the language that that audience recognizes.
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The creator with national reach delivers scale. The micro and nano network delivers capillarity and the confidence of those who speak close to the public. Together, they cover the fan in layers that mass media alone cannot reach.
It’s a difference in nature, not just in size: the brand stops appearing once for many people and starts appearing many times, in many contexts, within the conversation that the public was already having.
Attention is now shared
None of this replaces the transmission. The game continues to be the center, and that’s where all this talk comes from.
What has changed is that a second environment has been formed around the event, alive, simultaneous and measurable, and anyone who thinks about communication and brand investment can no longer treat it as an accessory.
It goes for the World Cup and it goes for any big event that brings the country together around a screen: the show is still there, but the attention, and the money that follows it, is now distributed across many screens at the same time.
