Courtesy of FIFA. FIFA World Cup 26™, Maple™, Zayu™ and Clutch™ are trademarks of FIFA.
Why characters are infrastructure, not campaigns.
Since 1966, every World Cup has left two kinds of memories: what happened on the pitch, and the character watching from the sidelines. Willie, Naranjito, Footix, Zakumi. I grew up gluing those mascots into sticker albums. France ’98 was my first one, and I could probably still draw Footix from memory.
This year the tradition leveled up. Maple, Zayu and Clutch weren’t just waving from the sidelines. Kids played with them in FIFA Heroes and across FIFA’s Roblox activations, while trading stickers of Messi and Mbappé. Mascots and superstars, sharing shelf space in the same childhood.
Pay attention to that detail. It says more about the future of branding than most trend reports. I’ve spent almost twenty years building characters for brands, and I still see the industry treat them as decoration, the cute thing you add to a campaign. The evidence says the opposite.
Characters aren’t campaigns. They’re infrastructure.
The oldest trick in branding is also the most underused
The Michelin Man has been selling tires since 1898. Tony the Tiger has been doing his job for more than seven decades. And one of the biggest entertainment companies on Earth grew out of one character. Walt Disney said he hoped they’d never lose sight of one thing: “that it was all started by a mouse.”
None of those were campaigns. They were long bets on a simple idea: give people a face to recognize, a personality to remember, a relationship that gets stronger every time it shows up.
The data backs this up, hard. A 2019 System1 analysis of brands that build their advertising around a recurring character found those campaigns were 37% more likely to grow market share and 30% more likely to drive profit gains than campaigns without one. And the effect compounds: in 2024, System1 and the IPA found that creatively consistent brands report double the very large profit gains of inconsistent ones, and consistency is exactly what a character makes possible.
Characters outperform celebrities, yet brands keep betting on borrowed fame. Data: System1, 2024; iSpot, 2026
And here’s the part I can’t explain: brands keep renting fame instead of building it. In this year’s Super Bowl, 62% of commercials leaned on celebrities, while in System1’s testing of four recent Super Bowls, barely one ad in ten was built around a brand character. Why? Because a celebrity delivers next quarter, and a character asks for the one thing quarterly marketing hates most: patience.
Proven effectiveness, minimal adoption. You don’t find many gaps that obvious in this industry.
The character renaissance is already here
Still, some brands are moving. McDonald’s brought its McDonaldland characters back from the vault last year. Grimace alone drove one of the brand’s most viral moments in years.
GEICO’s Gecko has spent more than 25 years making an insurance company feel likable (an insurance company!). And Duolingo’s owl built a bigger fanbase than most celebrities by acting like a character with opinions, not a logo with a posting schedule.
Sometimes the brand doesn’t even get a say. Apple’s Lil Finder Guy showed up this spring inside MacBook Neo marketing with no name, no press release, no formal launch. The internet adopted him anyway and did the rest of the marketing for free. When a character has a real personality, culture launches it before marketing does.
I’ve lived this from the inside. Years ago, Danone came to us to launch a lemon-flavored drink. Instead of a campaign, we pitched a character: Simón, a lemon with an attitude as acidic as his flavor.
He was supposed to sell a drink for one season. He ended up with his own social channels, a very particular sense of humor, and a trip to the World Cup as the national team’s most committed fan.
Yes. A lemon went to the World Cup.
The drink was eventually discontinued. Simón outlived the product he was born to sell, and that teaches you something no case study can. Ever since, when a client asks me for a campaign, my first question is what they’ll own when it’s over.
Because that’s the real difference: a campaign is an expense that ends when the media stops running. A character is equity. It can launch the next product, carry the next season, and keep showing up long after the budget line closes.
Simón el limón, from launch campaign to World Cup superfan. Courtesy of Pickbrain
AI changed the math
Here’s why I think about this more now than ever: AI changed the economics of content. Any brand can generate unlimited assets for a fraction of what they cost a few years ago. So can every competitor. So can a teenager with a laptop.
And believe me, I’m no skeptic. I run a creative studio that was born digital and has been working with AI since day zero. I love this technology.
Which is exactly why I can tell you what it doesn’t solve: when everyone can make everything, content stops being an advantage. The question is no longer how much you can produce. It’s what you own that can’t be copy-pasted.
A prompt can generate a character that looks like yours. What it can’t generate is the years of story, humor and inside jokes that make people care about yours. A character gains value every year it lives. Content made for the moment disappears with the moment.
There’s another thing the demos never show: the tools don’t set the quality bar, the people driving them do. Same model, different hands, radically different work.
That’s why we put skilled artists behind every generation, with real creative and audiovisual direction shaping what a character does on screen. Prompting is typing. Directing is knowing what to ask for, and noticing when it’s still not right.
AI raised the floor for everyone. Craft still sets the ceiling, and the ceiling is where characters actually come to life. Keeping a personality coherent across hundreds of pieces.
Directing a performance the way you’d direct an actor: the pause before the punchline, the look that says more than the line. Knowing which imperfection makes a moment feel real and which one breaks the illusion. Tools generate images. Teams with taste build characters people believe.
One more shift, and almost nobody talks about it: a character today is only as strong as the system behind it. That’s the lesson Botija forced me to learn. Uruguay’s national team mascot wasn’t born in a studio: fans voted him into existence in 2022, a sky-blue thermos chosen by more than a hundred thousand people. Our team later gave him his current 3D redesign and rebuilt him as a real-time content machine for this World Cup, his second.
The hard problem was never design. It was speed. A World Cup changes every ninety minutes, and a character that reacts a day late might as well not exist. What made him work wasn’t inspiration. It was a system: multi-purpose content prepared in advance, personality rules anyone on the team could apply, and AI supercharging production so a fictional character could react like it was living the tournament.
Botija, always on across every match scenario. Courtesy of Pickbrain
That’s what character-driven really means. Not just a beloved figure waving at halftime, but a character that’s always on, able to show up in the stadium, in the feed, and in a fan’s DMs at the same time, without losing what makes it lovable and authentic.
From mascots to ambassadors
The next layer is already arriving: AI is making characters interactive, able to hold real conversations with fans, in any language, all year long. The mascot that used to wave from the sidelines is becoming an ambassador that answers, and even the most iconic logo can’t say hello back.
So if you lead a brand, my advice is simple: stop asking whether you can afford a character program, and start asking what your brand will own in three years besides a folder of old campaigns. Treat the character like a product: a roadmap, an owner, KPIs measured in years, not quarters.
And if you design or animate characters for a living, this is your argument to forward. Your craft has never been more valuable. Every stat and every story in this piece is ammunition for the next time a client calls a character “nice to have.”
The World Cup final was played on July 19. FIFA will file this trio into history and, four years from now, unveil the next one. That’s the nature of a tournament: it ends.
Your brand plays a longer game. No final whistle, no trophy lift, no closing ceremony. Just an audience, year after year, deciding who deserves to be remembered.
Michelin earned a century with a man made of tires. Disney built an empire behind a mouse. Somewhere right now, the next iconic character is being sketched, for one of the few brands willing to commit while everyone else briefs another campaign.
Tournaments retire their mascots. Great brands raise theirs for life.