The tap-in goal—a close-range, light-touch shot—isn’t exactly the most celebrated move in soccer. But it’s the star of “Tap In,” Visa’s latest World Cup campaign.

A FIFA sponsor for 19 years, Visa equates the tap-in goal to the act of tapping a credit card to pay for a purchase. It’s meant to convey the message that Visa strives to make life easier for its customers.

“We want to articulate how we are the brand that is enabling [people] to tap into the excitement of the FIFA World Cup in ways that we hope feel very personal and immediate, and also are culturally relevant,” Andrea Fairchild, Visa’s SVP of global sponsorship strategy, told Marketing Brew.

While the tap-in goal may be understated, the campaign itself is less so; the ad features several international soccer stars and Ted Lasso himself, and is part of Visa’s biggest-ever sponsorship activation, according to Fairchild, but it’s not a straight brand awareness play.

• The 60-second spot opens on Ted Lasso star and cocreator Jason Sudeikis watching soccer, specifically Spanish forward Lamine Yamal (who’s currently sidelined with a hamstring injury) scoring a tap-in goal. The move inspires Sudeikis to tap his Visa card on a script, which turns into tickets.

The ad, which is running on broadcast, digital, and social platforms, is paired with a giveaway that lets Visa cardholders in the US and Canada enter to win prizes like World Cup tickets, signed memorabilia, and limited-edition merch whenever there’s a tap-in goal during the tournament.

Continue reading here.—AM

Security footage of traders leaving to go home at the end of the workday is punctuated by a score that would be at home in a thriller and a voice-over that questions the traders’ schedule: “Why do they get to decide when you can trade?”

It’s a question that’s designed to make viewers think about how the financial world works—and whether or not it works for them.

That’s what Coinbase is aiming for with its latest campaign by its in-house team, which includes four new product-focused spots, and expands on the brand’s focus from crypto to finance as a whole, Catherine Ferdon, Coinbase CMO, told us.

“We’re sitting at the nexus of two industries that don’t exactly give people the warm and fuzzies: Big Tech and finance,” Ferdon said. “What we’re really focused on is giving a voice to a utility that straddles those two industries.”

To do that, this year, Coinbase is creating spots that prompt viewers to question why things are the way that they are, and the new campaign, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” builds on that approach. Creating something provocative is the point.

“There’s constant regulatory scrutiny in a really, ever-evolving landscape for the field that we play in,” Ferdon said. “When you have that situation on the field, the very first instinct is to generate a very sterile brand. And I think we’ve gone a different way.”

Read more here.—KM

It seems like YouTube’s gargantuan ads business may never stop getting bigger. And its subscription video business is doing just fine, too: Subscription revenue makes up a third of YouTube’s total revenue, CEO Neal Mohan said onstage at this month’s MoffettNathanson Media, Internet, and Communications Conference in New York.

• The company has been investing significantly in YouTube TV and YouTube Premium with new content offerings and viewing features, which has paid off in subscriber growth, Mohan said.
• There are more than 125 million paid subscribers on YouTube Music and YouTube Premium as of 2025, he noted, a milestone the company announced a year ago.

It’s all a part of YouTube’s moves to continue to own living-room viewing.

“One of the nice things [about being] at YouTube and being part of the Alphabet family is we can make long-term bets…One of the longest bets that we made, and people thought we were crazy at the time, was investing in our subscriptions business,” he said. “When we were making those bets, people [were] like, ‘Well, why would people pay? You already offer all of this for free.’”

Continue reading here.—JS