In World Cup Marketing, the Most Expensive Thing Isn't Star Player Rights—It's Making Creativity Work Across Media

During the 2026 World Cup, the marketing battle off the pitch is even louder than the matches on it. Every brand is competing for the same thing: how to make consumers stop and remember you in the overwhelming flood of World Cup information.

The conventional path relies on star player copyrights—signing endorsements, launching co-branded products, and piggybacking on key tournament moments. However, the high cost of copyright fees puts most brands at an unequal starting line from the very beginning.

MINISO chose the exact opposite direction: skip buying star player authorizations entirely and return that budget directly to consumers. Customers spending 88 RMB received a peel-off fan card, collecting the top four teams allowed them to split a million-RMB cashback pool, and revealing the hidden "Go Team China" card immediately unlocked a 100 RMB voucher with no minimum spend.

The phrase "no star players" naturally carries viral potential in the context of the World Cup—consumers instantly understand what the brand is playing at, making it the starting point of social sharing.

However, being able to play with memes doesn't mean the visuals will hold up.

The task assigned to FansAI was: make "empty space" look better than "occupied space," while ensuring the scene remains physically credible.

Being Empty Is Harder Than Being Occupied

Many people's first reaction to the "transparent player" concept was: isn't that just masking out the person?

In reality, having no person is much harder to execute than having a person.

If you simply remove the player, what's left is a static void—the grass texture breaks at that spot, shadows vanish, light reflections leak, and the flying grass clippings or dust kicked up by footsteps disappear. The absence of these details makes the audience subconsciously realize that "something was deleted here," shattering the credibility of the whole frame.

A genuine "empty position" effect requires re-generating a complete environment at the character's location—extending grass textures, reconstructing shadows, correcting light reflections, and preserving the physical impact on the surrounding environment caused by the character's movement. The missing position must look visually as if "a real person was once standing there," rather than an "edited blank spot."

The dynamic level presents an even higher difficulty. Passing, heading, dribbling—the arc of the ball's trajectory, velocity changes, and contact relations with the transparent person must strictly obey real football physics laws. Audience members won't explicitly say "there is a problem with the physical logic," but they will feel that "this video looks fake."

This is precisely the outcome this concept could not afford—once the visuals lose realism, "no star players" flips from a clever marketing move into a "cheaply made, crude product."

When a creative idea is bold, the visual execution must be rock solid. Both matter equally, but push in completely different directions.

Making Creativity Technical: A Four-Layer Collaborative Workflow

Layer 1: AI Base Material Generation In the early phase, AI was used to generate complete scenes simulating real players playing football in stadium environments—passing, heading, dribbling, celebrating—presenting the real physical state of athletes on the pitch. The generation phase focused heavily on controlling movement rationality, ball contact relationships, and overall lighting consistency across the scene. The core objective of this step was establishing a complete set of "occupied" reference material—all subsequent empty-space processing and compositing were built upon this baseline.

Layer 2: Empty Space Processing & Background Fusion Based on the AI-generated "occupied" material, the player regions were replaced with transparent grid layers—the core visual expression of this concept. Once replaced, ComfyUI performed frame-by-frame background environment inpainting at the player's missing position: extending lawn textures, reconstructing shadows, and adjusting light reflections to ensure the empty space was visually a real physical space rather than an edited trace.

Layer 3: Dynamic Generation & Physics Logic Verification Seedance 2.0 handled the dynamic trajectory of the ball and spatial perspective continuity during scene transitions, prioritizing physics consistency around keyframes where the ball "contacted" the transparent person.

Layer 4: Multi-Layer Precise Compositing in After Effects Precise fusion of green-screen footage with AI backgrounds—chroma keying, edge feathering, motion blur matching, and frame-by-frame compositing precision checks. This was the stage with the highest proportion of manual intervention across the entire workflow; every keyframe where the transparent person touched the ball was manually inspected frame by frame to prevent edge artifacts or shadow placement errors.

The Real Technical Barrier: Content Adaptation for Extreme Media Environments

The workflow solved whether the visual could stand on its own, but the project presented another major challenge: synchronized adaptation across diverse outdoor media screen sizes.

Hangzhou West Lake Canopy has a visible area of 170m × 18m with a resolution of 7680×856—an extreme aspect ratio of approximately 9.4:1. The ultra-long LED giant screen in Shanghai's Lujiazui station transfer corridor extends over 112 meters, with an aspect ratio close to 15:1. Combined with standard center advertising screens in major shopping malls, every placement scenario featured entirely different specifications and viewing conditions.

A crucial insight worth recording: content adaptation is not mechanical cropping of a single version, but independent composition design for each size specification.

The visual focal point on the West Lake Canopy needed to stay focused across extreme horizontal extension while offering layered scene elements on both sides, ensuring core information was accessible from various viewing angles. For Lujiazui's transfer corridor screen, key information had to be delivered within roughly 3 seconds of a pedestrian walking past, requiring a rhythm and information density completely distinct from static viewing. Mall screens with standard aspect ratios were suited for close-up detail presentation and complete product exposure.

In any of these dimensions, a single-pixel misalignment on a player's edge would turn into a glaring flaw visible to the naked eye on a 170-meter canopy screen. This level of specification cannot be directly exported by any off-the-shelf AI tool and represented the highest technical precision demand of the project.

All versions were delivered in full within 10 days.

Insights for Brands: Anti-Routine Creativity Requires Uncompromised Execution

During super marketing windows like the World Cup, the real dilemma brands face isn't just budget—it's how to make creative ideas truly work when budgets are limited.

"No star players" is a creative decision, but whether that decision converts into content consumers want to share depends on whether execution can pull it off. The more counter-conventional the creativity, the higher the requirement for execution accuracy—because once the image loses fidelity, counter-conventional ideas turn counter-productive.

This is where content science delivers true value in brand marketing: not by replacing creative judgment, but by giving creative judgment the capacity to be executed with exact precision.

Every four years, brands get a World Cup window. To pull off a counter-conventional idea like "no star players" in that window requires more than creativity—it demands determination and flawless execution capability.