Andrew Tindall examines the World Cup campaigns from Nike and Adidas and asks whether marketers are drawing the wrong lessons from Lots of Littles.

I don’t care for football, but I’m deeply interested in the marketing campaigns behind the World Cup. We have some very serious, very large brands finally putting some of the theory marketers have been debating for the past couple of years to the test.

A five-minute film, Backyard Legends, starring Timothée Chalamet, Messi, Bad Bunny, Lamine Yamal, Jude Bellingham, Trinity Rodman, Zidane, Beckham and Del Piero, bundled into one knowingly excessive piece of football theater. A moonshot with studs on.

Nike has gone the other way. 

Less one hero film, more a football universe. Toma Live is a global celebration of street football culture, community and creativity. Young players, creators, streamers, city experiences, music, merch and exclusive drops. Less “everyone stop and watch this one thing,” more “here are 47 doors into our world; choose whichever you like.” It will be streamed by Amazon on June 7 but you can get a tease of it below.

Nike is doing what Meta now advises marketers to do: creative proliferation, moving from a big idea to systems of ideas, multiple motivators across multiple canvases, held together by brand ethos. Marketing has given this worldview a name. 

Tom Roach and the IPA call it Lots of Littles. 

Right now, it is having its moment but is it the best move? 

We will find out.

On the other side of the debate are some real showstoppers. Les Binet and Will Davis have just published Go Big or Go Home through the IPA, arguing the opposite. Everyone is very interested in which one is right, but few are asking “for whom.”

The doctrine with very convenient timing

The intellectual case for Lots of Littles comes from a Havas, Lumen and Brand Metrics paper that cut through 9,000 brand lift studies and found that aggregate attention matters. For display advertising, repeated exposures of one second or more can outperform fewer, longer exposures for building awareness. Grace Kite made the chart famous: four ads of roughly one to two seconds each can outperform two ads of five seconds or more.

Source: Brand Metrics, Havas, Lumen. 9,000 brand lift studies, 2024. Via Magic Numbers.

Tom Roach extended the thinking with Lots of Littles: Part II at the IPA Effectiveness Conference, building a practical frame for how brands grow in a world of fractured attention.

There is something real here. 

The old model of one film, one cut-down and one banner is dead for most digital environments. Platforms demand creative variation. The same idea has to bend into different shapes without snapping. 

This is a modern fact of proper modern planning.

But I have to say that I agree with Karen Nelson-Field, who takes a rather practical view that the thinking comes from a study of display advertising. 

One channel, and one of the lowest-attention formats in the mix. One that, I may add, has never sparked a conversation in a pub. 

Yet the planning world is already generalizing it into a universal philosophy for how brands should be built across every medium, format and budget size. The paper itself warns against exactly this extrapolation. Marketers appear to be ignoring that part.

And I would be a terrible marketer if I didn’t notice that this particular doctrine is enormously convenient for everyone selling more crappy digital inventory.

What Binet actually says

Les Binet and Will Davis’s Go Big or Go Home, published through the IPA, lands at exactly the right moment. It is not a nostalgic plea for 60-second linear TV spots, however much some people would like to frame it that way. 

The numbers are not comfortable.

Budget explains eight times more of the variation in profit than the ROI differences we obsess over. When Binet and Davis looked at how profit varied across IPA Effectiveness Award-winning case studies, ROI accounted for just 11% of that variation. Budget accounted for 89%. And yet only 35% of senior marketers said budget was the most important driver of effectiveness, versus 65% who said ROI.

Want to go deeper? Ask The Drum

Source: Go Big or Go Home, Les Binet and Will Davis. IPA / Medialab / Ravensbourne University London, 2025.

Viral reach is no substitute either. Baby Shark, the most-watched online video of all time, generated 1bn UK views over eight years. John Lewis’s Christmas ads got 5bn UK views in just four years, through paid television. A dramatic demonstration for those attempting to strike gold at the casino of earned reach.

Source: Go Big or Go Home, Les Binet and Will Davis. IPA / Medialab / Ravensbourne University London, 2025.

Since Covid, ROI is up 4%, according to this research. Net profit generated from advertising is down 11%. Marketing has developed a dangerous addiction to efficiency: tighter targeting, smaller media plans and a focus on the metrics that look good in a deck.

I’ve found the same pattern in my own research with System1 and Effie, The Creative Dividend: media spend and channel choice set the scale of the opportunity while creativity determines the quality of impact within it. Both need to be big enough to matter.

The best version of Go Big is not anti-fragmentation. Binet and Davis are clear that big effects need big media, big creative and scale across channels, more channels than ever. But those channels and assets need to ladder back to one brand world and one memory structure. I think Adidas is a clearer demonstration of these principles.

Why Adidas has the better hand

In System1 testing, the Adidas 40-second cut scores 4.5 Stars. The asset no one is talking about on LinkedIn is the asset doing the heavy lifting at scale. Adidas has built a system around its five-minute film. The long film creates the cultural object. The 40-second version does the heavy paid media job: big, booming emotional creativity at scale. The social edits keep the idea moving in feed environments, topping up and refreshing the memories from other channels. It is not reliant on earned fame alone, or even lots of littles. It is one organizing idea, with every asset feeding back to the same center of gravity, with a load of spend behind it, in high-attention and low-attention channels.

Nike’s approach may generate real heat in specific communities: the street football world, the creator economy, younger and more culturally engaged audiences. I am not dismissing it. But Nike has something most brands would mortgage themselves for: the Swoosh is already cultural infrastructure. Decades of fame, meaning and emotional residue in the bank. When Nike does Lots of Littles, it is withdrawing from a vast stored account. Every small encounter activates something built over years of enormous advertising. That is not replicable by brands with shallower roots. Looking at this example and preaching it as a universal model would be misleading at best, irresponsible at worst.

Your brand is not Nike

The brands making ecosystem marketing work are, almost without exception, already enormous. They have fame and cultural meaning. They have the brand equity to make every small encounter land because there is something big behind it. For them, Lots of Littles is a way of staying warm, not getting hot.

For everyone else, which is most brands, the risk is obvious. Three years of content, activations, engagement metrics and consultancy fees later, the dashboard looks alive. The brand isn’t.

Plenty of marketers now confuse a pile of Lego with a cathedral.

The Go Big case is not that small assets don’t matter. They do. The argument is that without something large at the center, something with enough emotional weight to create a shared memory and enough paid reach behind it, the small assets have nothing to amplify, nothing to feed and nothing to mean. You cannot make small sparks add up to a bonfire.

I’ll clarify further, as I expect some disagreement. Yes, there are some brands that have caught the wind right and whose organic or low-attention-only media plans have made them go boom. These are rare examples that are rationalized after the fact.

I’m pushing us toward a more realistic, balanced view that all channels must work and amplify each other, and the single idea still has a role in modern marketing.

Nike’s ecosystem might be the smarter long game for a brand of its size and cultural position. I genuinely don’t know yet. Both teams are excellent at their jobs and I’d reserve full judgment until the sales data arrives. But if you forced me to bet on which strategy builds the most shared fame, the fastest, with the largest number of people, I am backing the one that went looking for it with an approach that some might attempt to call outdated and unpopular these days.

Often the most effective things in modern marketing aren’t popular, otherwise I’d be writing about radio advertising today.

Lots of Littles is a useful truth about how attention accumulates in digital advertising, helping big brands stay big. Go Big is a strategy for how brands become famous and build new memories. Which is why I think Adidas will be the most dramatic campaign of this World Cup.

That’s my interpretation of it anyway. To see the man himself, Les Binet, address this directly, get yourself to the WARC stage at Cannes Lions in a couple of weeks.

Andrew Tindall is a senior leader in the advertising industry and leads growth at System1, where he champions creative effectiveness and evidence-based marketing. Known for his sharp thinking on out-of-home, emotional advertising, and brand growth, he’s become a go-to voice on how creativity and data can work together. With experience across major brands like Diageo and Bacardi, Andrew now helps global agencies and marketers make better ads that actually work, contributing regularly to panels, podcasts, and the occasional punchy LinkedIn rant.

Read more opinion from Andrew. You can get in touch with them here.