Rich James, MD of Flourish CRM, looks at how brands should connect with fans at the World Cup
With the World Cup just around the corner, brands are gearing up for one of the biggest attention spikes in global culture.
Capitalising on this moment means understanding how live sport is now experienced: in real time, second screening as standard, and through fluid movement across platforms, conversations and communities.
WhatsApp alone now reaches over 3 billion people globally, with users opening the app multiple times a day and message open rates as high as 90–98%. It is also increasingly established as a commercial channel, with around 200 million businesses using WhatsApp for marketing, notifications and customer support, and 66% of users having made a purchase after communicating with a brand on the platform.
Its significance for brands is also in behaviour. People use messaging platforms throughout the day for immediate, personal and responsive communication, which makes them highly relevant environments for live, participatory engagement.
This is where direct, one-to-one communication between brands and consumers should have an advantage.
Too often, brands treat these channels as another place to distribute content, rather than as spaces designed for interaction. A WhatsApp message that simply announces a campaign is still passive, while a message that invites a prediction, unlocks a reward, adapts to a scoreline or lets fans choose what happens next is participatory.
When brands fail to deliver a more immersive brand experience, the communication can feel curated and one-directional, falling short of the immediacy and participation users of these platforms increasingly expect.
It’s not the channel, it’s the play
In high-attention moments, effectiveness isn’t defined by how close a channel sits to the consumer, but by how actively it can involve them.
For years, the industry has separated channels into neat categories: social for broadcast and engagement, customer relationship management for one-to-one communication. But during live sport, those definitions become less useful. Attention moves fluidly: a fan might watch the match on TV, react on social, message a group chat, vote in a poll, check a live stat and respond to a brand notification within the same few minutes.
At the same time, the platforms themselves have blurred. Social now enables real-time interaction at scale, while one-to-one environments are increasingly used for broadcast-style messaging, as seen in formats like WhatsApp Channels alongside its more personal Chats.
This means the real divide is participation versus passivity.
Ultimately, effectiveness comes down to whether you give people something to do. In a match-day context, that can create a true “watch-along” rather than a passive “watch”.
You can’t schedule a moment
If participation defines effectiveness, then timing is critical. In live environments, relevance is fleeting. Attention peaks in the moment and drops just as quickly if content doesn’t keep pace.
Social teams have adapted to this, building the tools and muscle memory to respond instantly. One-to-one communication, however, has often remained rooted in a different model shaped not by mindset, but by the technology behind it. It’s historically built for scheduled sends and structured journeys, which has reinforced a more fixed, campaign-led approach. That’s where the disconnect shows.
However, there is plenty of opportunity here.
Direct channels are uniquely positioned to do what broadcast cannot: create timely, personal interactions at scale. And increasingly, the technology is evolving to support this, with real-time automation and more flexible messaging infrastructure. This can expand their role by layering moment-based engagement alongside planned activity.
From messaging to experience
In 2024, the MTV VMAs set a strong example, inviting fans to vote for Best New Artist live during the show through WhatsApp for the first time. Rather than using the channel to send an update or drive people elsewhere, WhatsApp became part of the experience: a live participation layer where audiences could act in the same space the interaction was happening.
The same principle can be applied to live sport. A World Cup match creates hundreds of moments a brand could respond to in real time, but the strongest opportunities come when brands decide what they want to own. From fan predictions and scoreline-triggered rewards to interactive mechanics that give supporters a role in the experience around the game. In that context, direct messaging becomes the start of an experience. The message is now something to do.
Evolving for a real-time world
To meet the expectations set by real-time engagement, brands need to become more flexible, more responsive, and more participatory. In essence, capable of adapting in the moment and enabling genuine interaction.
That means building journeys around the live rhythm of the tournament, powered by a pre-prepared content library that enables brands to respond at speed. This can include triggered prompts after key match moments, rewards linked to live outcomes, or post-match recaps shaped by each fan’s engagement.
This also requires a more nuanced understanding of channels. As the ecosystem expands, from WhatsApp to text messages and beyond, brands need to design for how each space is actually used, not treat them all as broadcast.
Crucially, this is about complementing existing marketing approaches. It should bring brands closer to how people engage today: fluidly, across platforms, and in real time, especially in moments like the World Cup where attention, emotion and interaction all peak at once.
Rich James is MD of Flourish CRM
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