The World Cup’s hydration breaks revealed where attention really went

The commercial break is losing its monopoly

UserTesting compared a pre-tournament survey of 1,000 UK consumers with their reported behavior after the World Cup. Before play began, 74% expected to notice or engage with World Cup advertising. Afterward, one-third said they neither noticed nor engaged with ads.

The sharpest disappointment came at halftime. Before the tournament, 37% expected to engage with advertising during the break. Only 21% said they actually did.

And viewers did not simply sit idle. They migrated elsewhere: social media, news, food-delivery apps and other second-screen activities competed for attention. The phone became an escape hatch from the commercial break.

That makes another finding especially interesting. In-game engagement outperformed expectations, rising to 34% from a predicted 26%. And the tournament’s newly standardized hydration breaks captured 19% of engagement—nearly twice the pre-tournament expectation of 10%.

A pause that became something else

The hydration breaks were controversial almost from kickoff.

FIFA mandated a three-minute stoppage midway through each half of every match, regardless of weather conditions, saying the measure was intended to prioritize player welfare amid concerns about high temperatures. Commercial broadcasters were also allowed to use the breaks for advertising, either through split-screen ads from FIFA partners or full commercial cutaways, according to ESPN.

The Athletic described the breaks as one of several ways the tournament adopted the rhythms from American sports. Players could rest, coaches could make tactical adjustments, while broadcasters gained a new commercial window inside the game itself.

Coca-Cola was among the companies that benefited. Reuters reported that Coca-Cola CFO John Murphy welcomed the hydration breaks, noting the boost they provided to the company’s Powerade brand.

Attention follows the game

For marketers, the lesson is larger than whether FIFA keeps hydration breaks.

UserTesting’s findings suggest that proximity to the action matters more than the traditional advertising calendar assumes. Viewers may resist being handed over to advertisers at halftime, but remain surprisingly receptive during shorter pauses embedded within the drama.

That does not make hydration breaks a magic advertising slot. It makes them evidence of something more consequential: audiences decide when they are still “in” the experience.

The best sports marketing, then, may depend less on buying the biggest break and more on understanding where attention actually goes when the whistle blows.

Related resources

• Designing a winning streaming service for the World Cup. This on-demand webinar stays within the World Cup context, examining how SBS On Demand used UserTesting to create an experience that reached 4.5 million viewers during the tournament.
• Unlocking audience insights: driving smarter decisions across product, marketing, and UX. This guides explores how behavioral and audience insights reveal what actually motivates consumers, making it a natural extension of the World Cup research showing the gap between what fans predicted they would do and how they actually behaved.
• The truth about consumer insights marketing with Archer's Andrew Thomas. In this Insights Unlocked episode, Andrew Thomas discusses the disconnect between the way marketers think about brands and the way consumers actually behave—closely echoing the hydration-break research and its lessons about assumptions versus real audience attention.
• How to drive more effective marketing with fast human insight. This blog post argues that marketers shouldn't send creative “in the blind,” and explains how testing ads, messages, social content and video with real audiences can reveal whether marketing actually resonates before money is spent—a strong practical follow-on to the World Cup findings.