FIFA fever has taken the country — and the world — by storm. Around the globe, soccer has captured the attention of sports diehards and casual fans alike, dominating conversations from boardrooms to living rooms.
At V2 Communications, we’ve helped our clients lean into the buzz in authentic, strategic ways — aligning their expertise and value proposition with the football fanaticism captivating audiences worldwide. The result: timely campaigns that elevated brand visibility, built market authority, and landed in the outlets that matter.
Here are three examples of how we made it happen.
SEON: Turning Betting Trends into a Fraud Prevention Story
The 2026 World Cup is shaping up to be the largest gambling event in history — and SEON, a fraud prevention and anti-money laundering platform, saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight.
V2 worked with SEON to commission a survey of nearly 600 U.S. adults to uncover betting trends tied to World Cup matches. The findings were striking: 43% said they were at least somewhat likely to bet on games, yet 45% expressed little confidence that betting platforms could protect their personal and financial data during a high-traffic event of this scale. Nearly a quarter (24%) had already encountered social media scams related to World Cup betting, 1 in 5 (20%) had come across fake ticket websites and 18% reported seeing fraudulent betting apps.
Those numbers told a clear story — and a timely one. V2 brought it to the right outlets, securing coverage in CNBC, Yahoo! Sports, Gambling Insider and more. By meeting the moment with data that was both relevant and alarming, SEON’s expertise in fraud prevention reached audiences actively thinking about exactly that risk.
Horizons for Homeless Children: Bringing the Tartan Army to Boston’s Kids
Not every World Cup campaign is built on data. Sometimes, the best story is one that takes place “off the pitch”.
Scotland’s beloved Tartan Army makes it a point to engage and support the communities where they visit – and Boston’s Horizons for Homeless Children — a Boston-based nonprofit and leading provider of early education, family support and advocacy for young children and families experiencing homelessness — was one of the many beneficiaries of the Tartan Army’s benevolence. So of course, the non-profit invited them for a visit, and they came — bagpipes and all.
V2 saw the moment for what it was: a story worth telling. We reached out to local media and invited them to see it for themselves. The Boston Globe and WCVB Channel 5 were among the outlets that showed up, and the campaign ultimately generated more than 50 broadcast and print placements over the course of several days.
It was a reminder of what the World Cup does at its best — bring people together across borders and backgrounds— and a chance to shine a light on an organization doing that kind of work every day.
SimScale: The Engineering Problem Hidden Inside Every World Cup Stadium
Building a World Cup stadium sounds straightforward — until you start asking who it’s actually for. For SimScale, an engineering AI company, that question was the foundation of a thought leadership play that cut through the tournament noise.
V2 landed a co-authored byline in Design World — written alongside Jeroen Janssen of Thornton Tomasetti ,a leading global science and engineering consulting firm — that put the structural challenge front and center. A World Cup stadium has to serve three stakeholders at once, and their needs pull in opposite directions: the pitch demands open air, sunlight and natural ventilation; the fans want shade, enclosure and the kind of acoustic bowl that makes a stadium come alive; and the architects and engineers have to find a design that satisfies both — without the ability to physically test every configuration before breaking ground.
Rather than pitch SimScale’s software directly, the byline showed how cloud-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation lets architects and engineers test dozens of design configurations — modeling airflow, spectator comfort and pitch conditions — before anything is committed to steel and concrete.
Co-authoring with Thornton Tomasetti added a second voice of real-world engineering authority, and Design World put the story directly in front of the technical audience SimScale was built for.
The angle worked because it did what the best thought leadership always does: took a story everyone was already watching and reoriented it toward a problem worth solving.
The Playbook Behind the Play
Three clients. Three industries. Three very different stories — but the same instinct behind each one: find what’s genuinely interesting, connect it to what’s already capturing attention and get it in front of the right people. The World Cup gave us the moment. Our clients gave us the substance. The rest was just good PR.
Kristen Leathers is an executive vice president at V2 Communications, where she leads the firm’s B2B technology practice. Building upon her nearly 15 years of crafting and executing high-impact communications programs for her clients, Kristen counsels brands on integrated strategies that support their marketing and broader business objectives – whether those be building brand or category awareness, establishing market leadership, or managing brand reputation.
About V2 Communications
V2 Communications is a top PR firm for tech companies and a leading integrated communications partner focused on B2B, AI, climate and energy, and healthcare technology brands. The firm delivers integrated communications programs across earned, owned and paid media, helping companies build market leadership, increase visibility and drive measurable business results.