FEMA World Cup
Strategy
Project Overview
The FIFA World Cup 2026 brought the world's largest sporting event to American soil and with it, an unprecedented public safety challenge.
I led creative and brand strategy for FEMA's World Cup campaign, developing a system of public-facing communications designed to keep millions of domestic and international visitors safe across host cities nationwide. The work spanned a sizzle reel, social and digital graphics, and a cohesive visual campaign built to perform at the scale and speed the moment demanded.
This was emergency preparedness meeting a global stage.
The Challenge
World Cup audiences are not a typical FEMA audience.
The campaign had to reach tens of millions of people many of them international visitors unfamiliar with U.S. emergency systems across twelve host cities, multiple languages, and an accelerated event timeline. Traditional preparedness messaging was not built for this environment.
The challenge was making safety information feel accessible, not alarming, and relevant to people who were focused on the celebration, not contingency planning. It had to cut through the noise of one of the most visually saturated events on the planet while still landing with clarity and authority.
We needed FEMA and Ready brands to show up at the volume of the World Cup without losing the trust that the brand is built on.
The Process
We started by mapping the audience landscape. International visitors, domestic attendees, host city residents, and local emergency management partners all had different needs and different relationships with FEMA as a brand.
From there, we built a creative strategy that treated safety information as part of the World Cup experience rather than an interruption to it. The visual language was designed to feel energetic and globally fluent bold, high-contrast, and adaptable across languages and platforms.
The sizzle reel was developed to capture both the scale of the event and the stakes of the mission, giving partners and media a fast, visceral sense of the campaign's purpose and reach. Graphics were built modularly so assets could flex across host cities, hazard types, and real-time deployment needs without losing visual cohesion.
Speed and consistency had to coexist. Every deliverable was built for rapid adaptation without sacrificing brand integrity.
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The Solution
The final campaign delivered an integrated creative system built for one of the most complex public safety communications challenges FEMA had ever faced.
The sizzle reel anchored the campaign, setting the tone, communicating urgency and readiness, and building alignment across agency stakeholders and city partners. Graphics extended the campaign across digital, social, and on-the-ground applications, giving host cities a consistent visual toolkit they could activate quickly.
Messaging was framed around confidence, not fear. Rather than leading with worst-case scenarios, the campaign focused on empowering people to know what to do, where to go, and who to trust. Safety became something you were ready for, not something that was happening to you.
The result was a campaign that looked and felt like it belonged at the World Cup, while never losing sight of what FEMA is there to do.
Conclusion
What made this campaign work was the decision to meet the audience where they were, inside one of the most electric sporting events in the world, rather than asking them to step outside of it to absorb a safety message.
The modular creative system proved essential. With twelve host cities and shifting real-time conditions, adaptability was not a nice-to-have. It was the strategy.
If developing this further, I would push even deeper into city-specific and language-specific creative, localizing not just the language but the visual context and cultural references that make safety information feel personal and credible. Behavioral testing on which creative triggers drove the most meaningful engagement would also sharpen future executions.
The World Cup only comes around so often. The safety infrastructure behind it has to be ready from day one. This campaign helped make that possible.