ITV says World Cup will be ‘six-week Super Bowl’ for advertising

One of those is Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone lager brand, which booked slots after the huge media coverage produced by the success of the Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir winning Britain’s Got Talent last month.

Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone lager brand has booked ITV ad slots during the World Cup. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty for Hawkstone

The most high-profile ad campaign is Nike’s World Cup ad which, at six minutes, will be the longest commercial ever aired on TV in the UK. The ad of superstar footballers, which will air for the first time during England’s opening match against Croatia, features Cole Palmer, who did not make the squad.

The media regulator, Ofcom, limits the number of minutes of ads a broadcaster is allowed to air in an hour, but this rule works on an average so ITV is able toadjust its overall ad allocation to run the full Nike commercial.

Williams added that one thing that “stood out” among the range of advertisers for the tournament was the number of AI and tech companies booking ad slots. He said that as well as Google there are ads running from Amazon Web Services, Apple, Dell, Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta.

The time difference with North America means that kick-off times for England’s first games are 9pm or 10pm, a potentially more attractive time of day for advertisers than the afternoon times of tournaments held in Europe.

However, while ITV expects to see a boost from audiences watching Scotland’s progress, the times of the group matches are much more unsociable, at either 11pm or 2am.

ITV’s World Cup team, which will cover the tournament from New York. Photograph: ITV

The BBC has the rights to air the remaining World Cup matches in the UK.

ITV has set up a glitzy studio in Brooklyn, with views of the Manhattan skyline, while the BBC has opted to broadcast out of its studios in Salford, Manchester.

The former lead BBC football presenter, Gary Lineker, has signed a reported £14m deal with Netflix to stream daily versions of his lucrative The Rest Is Football podcast from a studio in downtown New York.

Lineker left the BBC last May, after another row about his social media posts, having been due to host his seventh World Cup.

In April, he said he would have been “in Salford in a green box” instead of “overlooking Times Square with lots of great guests”.

On Tuesday, Alex Kay-Jelski, the director of BBC Sport, unveiled its studio set-up and defended the decision to be based in the UK, saying “the actual end product that people are getting at home, I don’t really think it’s that different”.