By Scott Young, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Transmit
As the World Cup approaches, the advertising industry is preparing for one of the largest global audiences in media. Billions of viewers will tune in, creating appointment viewing at an unmatched scale.
Alongside that anticipation has come discussion of new hydration breaks during matches. Many observers have described these pauses in play as de facto “TV timeouts” to create incremental ad inventory in a sport that traditionally has none.
It’s an understandable impulse, but it moves the industry in the wrong direction.
Adding stoppages to create more ad space amounts to changing the game consumers love for the sake of advertising. At a moment when live sports are rapidly expanding in streaming, we should be asking a different question: How do we change advertising to fit the game?
The Growing Ad Load Problem
Soccer isn’t the first sport to face this tension.
NBA games are routinely criticized for feeling bloated with stoppages. NFL broadcasts are saturated with commercial breaks. Across leagues, ad loads have crept upward as rights fees have soared.
The economics explain why. Live sports rights are extraordinarily expensive. For broadcasters and streaming platforms, advertising is essential to making those investments viable. Advertisers, for their part, are eager to reach large, synchronous audiences that are increasingly rare in an on-demand world.
But this arms race carries a real risk. When ad load expands to the point that it degrades the viewing experience, it chips away at the very thing that makes the inventory so valuable: sustained, collective attention.
When the audience experience erodes, so does the inventory.
Why Soccer Is a Tipping Point
Soccer exposes this tension more clearly than almost any other sport.
The beauty of the game lies in its continuity: There are no natural TV timeouts and the action flows uninterrupted for 45 minutes at a time. That uninterrupted intensity is part of what makes global tournaments so compelling.
Introducing artificial stoppages to manufacture ad inventory risks undermining that core appeal.
In contrast, consider Major League Baseball’s recent pitch clock reforms. MLB shortened games to improve pace and retain viewers. The league focused on strengthening the product for fans, and advertisers followed.
Soccer presents a similar inflection point. Its structure forces the industry to get more creative. But instead of inserting more breaks, we need to find monetization models that preserve, even enhance, the live, continuous nature of the sport.
Given soccer’s global reach, getting this right matters for publishers, advertisers, and the long-term value of the sport itself.
A Better Way to Monetize Live Sports
The solution isn’t fewer ads. It’s better ads.
For decades, the 30-second interruptive spot has been the dominant format. In many cases, it remains effective. But in a live streaming environment, relying solely on interruptive breaks is limiting.
With advances in AI, ads can integrate into the natural rhythm of live gameplay and appear during the most natural, least disruptive moments. Instead of forcing a full-screen interruption, advertising can live within the flow of the broadcast. It can appear at moments of natural pause, be contextually relevant, and respect the continuity of the event while still commanding attention.
More broadly, this is where advertising is headed in the AI era: the right creative, delivered at the right moment, potentially even tailored uniquely for each impression. When ads complement the match, rather than compete with it, there is a tighter connection between advertiser, content, and consumer.
Live sports do not need to be reshaped to accommodate legacy ad formats. The formats themselves should evolve to make monetization more seamless for advertisers, publishers, and viewers.
Protecting the Value of Live Sports
Live sports remain one of the few properties in media that cannot be replicated by algorithms or displaced by on-demand libraries. They command massive, contemporaneous audiences and create shared cultural moments.
But if the industry’s response to rising rights costs is simply to add more stoppages, we risk weakening the product that underpins the entire business model. If instead we invest in innovation that aligns advertising with the natural rhythm of live sports, we can expand monetization while strengthening the experience.
The World Cup offers a global stage. It should not become a case study in how advertising changes the game. It should be an example of how advertising evolves to support it.
Change ads for the game, not the game for ads.
