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McDonald's ends its FIFA sponsorship, Patrón stages a Día de Muertos comedy event, and UK panic-buying spikes demand for tinned food and bottled water.
McDonald's has walked away from FIFA — and it should make every FMCG brand manager question their sports deals. Plus, what Patrón's Día de Muertos activation gets right about premium marketing.
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The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Something a bit different on the show today — panic-buying, premium tequila, and the end of a very big sports deal.
Klara: We're looking at what the UK government's emergency stockpile advice is doing to FMCG sales, how Patrón is turning Día de Muertos into a marketing moment, and what McDonald's walking away from FIFA tells us about sponsorship spending.
Marco: Let's get into it.
Marco: The UK government told people to stockpile emergency supplies — and the supermarket shelves started emptying almost immediately.
Klara: To understand why this matters for FMCG brands, you have to picture the normal state of ambient food — that's the category covering tinned goods, bottled water, long-life products. Sales are steady, predictable, and honestly pretty boring to market. Nobody urgently needs a tin of baked beans on a Tuesday morning.
Marco: Until they do. The government published emergency preparedness guidance advising households to keep supplies at home — and retailers saw demand spike fast. Bottled water and tinned food flew off shelves. Shoppers also started buying wind-up radios and torches, which tells you something important: this wasn't just a specific product run. It was a broader shift in consumer mindset — people weren't just buying food, they were buying reassurance.
Klara: And here's the uncomfortable truth for brand managers in those categories — almost none of this demand was created by a brand. No campaign triggered it. No clever ad. A government press release did the job. The question is: who was structurally ready to capture that moment, and who got bypassed in favour of whatever was on the shelf?
Marco: My view is that this is where brand agility — meaning how fast a brand can respond with availability signals, retail presence, and relevant messaging — separates the serious players from the passive ones. If your product is already well-distributed and visible, you benefit. If not, private label picks up the sale instead.
Klara: I'd add a small note of caution there. Brands that rush to visibly capitalise on a fear-driven moment risk looking opportunistic. There's a difference between being available and being seen to profit from public anxiety.
Marco: Fair distinction. Availability is the right lever. Loud marketing around stockpiling probably isn't.
Klara: Our next story is coming up right after this.
Marco: Patrón Tequila just ran a one-night-only live comedy show timed to Día de Muertos — and it's worth understanding why that decision says a lot about where premium brand marketing is heading.
Klara: For context, Día de Muertos is the Mexican cultural celebration honoring those who've passed — it falls at the start of November and has enormous resonance with Latino communities. For spirits brands, the autumn calendar is incredibly crowded. Halloween, Día de Muertos, the run-up to Christmas — every brand is shouting at once.
Marco: Patrón's response to that crowding was to stop shouting and do something instead. Rather than running a multi-channel paid campaign — ads across TV, digital, social — they staged a single live comedy event, culturally anchored to the occasion, aimed directly at deepening their connection with Latino consumers. One night, one room, one experience. That's the whole activation.
Klara: And I think there's something genuinely smart there. When every brand is buying the same calendar moments with paid media, actually owning a cultural moment — hosting it, shaping it — cuts through in a way that another thirty-second ad simply can't.
Marco: The strategic shift here is moving from share-of-voice — which basically means how loudly you're advertising compared to rivals — to what I'd call share-of-meaning. Are people connecting your brand to something that actually matters to them?
Klara: Where I'd push back slightly is on the measurement side. A packed advertising campaign gives you clear numbers — reach, impressions, sales lift. One live event is harder to quantify. Brand affinity is real, but it's slower to show up in a spreadsheet.
Marco: Which is exactly why most brand managers never make this call. It takes confidence in your long-term positioning.
Klara: Our third and final story is up next.
Marco: McDonald's has quietly walked away from one of the biggest sponsorship deals in world sport — its long-running partnership with FIFA.
Klara: To understand the scale of what just happened, you have to appreciate what a FIFA sponsorship actually means. It's not a pitch-side banner. It's a global platform — World Cup visibility, official partner status across dozens of markets, the kind of brand association money can't easily replicate elsewhere. Brands like McDonald's have held these deals for decades partly because of the sheer prestige they carry.
Marco: And that prestige is exactly what McDonald's has now decided isn't worth the price. The company has ended the partnership, walking away from one of the highest-profile sports marketing platforms on the planet. Industry analysts are already saying this could push other major brands to look harder at their own sports rights — and ask whether the spend is genuinely moving sales, or just making the boardroom feel good.
Klara: The honest read here is that this is brand effectiveness teams finally getting a seat at the table. For years, mega-sponsorships like this were justified by what I'd call soft value — brand awareness, association with a global moment, general goodwill. All real things, but hard to pin to a revenue number. What McDonald's appears to be saying is: that's no longer enough.
Marco: For any FMCG brand manager sitting on a sports sponsorship right now — a league deal, a team shirt, a tournament tie-up — this should prompt a very direct internal conversation. Can you show that this deal moves product? Not just brand trackers, not just awareness scores, but actual purchase behaviour?
Klara: I'd temper that slightly. Some sponsorships genuinely do build long-term brand equity in ways that a quarterly sales report won't capture. The danger is that brands swing too far toward short-term measurement and cut things that were quietly doing real work.
Marco: That's a legitimate tension. But if you can't even start to answer the ROI question, McDonald's just made your next budget review a lot harder.
Marco: Today's clearest signal — external events, cultural moments, and sponsorship deals all come down to the same question: can you prove it's working?
Klara: So look at your biggest marketing commitment right now, and ask honestly whether you could justify it with hard numbers if someone senior asked tomorrow.