Visit Seattle has appointed British marketing agency B-Engaged to build and activate a soccer-led campaign across Europe and Asia ahead of the 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup, targeting travelers from the United Kingdom and India as the highest-upside inbound markets.

The city will host six matches next summer: four group-stage games, one Round of 32 fixture and one Round of 16 tie. The December draw confirmed the USA, Belgium, Egypt, Australia, Qatar and Iran will play in Seattle, along with the winner of a pre-qualifying round between Northern Ireland and, potentially, Wales or Bosnia and Herzegovina. The USA plays on Friday, June 19, 2026.

Byington, CMO of the private, non-profit DMO serving Seattle and King County, said her team assessed source countries on visas, flight access and fandom before concentrating spend on the UK and India. B-Engaged will handle media partnerships and football content connecting Seattle with audiences across both continents.

The campaign will run largely as English-language content marketing with local influencers. "The main idea behind the campaign is to embed Seattle into conversations that are already happening around the World Cup," Byington told Portada. The city's existing MLS franchise, the Seattle Sounders, gives the destination what she calls a built-in soccer culture to build on.

Distribution play for stakeholders

The second half of the strategy targets conversion once fans arrive. Visit Seattle built a brand toolkit — available at visitseattle.org — that hotels, restaurants, meeting planners and the airport can deploy to make visiting fans feel welcome. For sellers of travel, the toolkit functions as a co-marketing asset: it standardizes how roughly the full range of King County hospitality businesses, a sector employing 68,000 workers, presents the destination during the tournament window.

Visit Seattle is funded by hotels — including tax revenue from hotel sales — and the convention centers, so its return on World Cup spend ultimately registers as occupied rooms and convention business rather than brand impressions alone.

Awareness spend dominates, with conversion layered on

Byington described a full-funnel approach. The bulk of advertising spending goes to branding and awareness across CTV, out-of-home in seven markets (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego, Chicago and Washington, DC), national print, digital and podcasts. The DMO measures awareness impact through annual surveys of 2,500 people, tracked year over year.

Below the funnel, Visit Seattle places advertising on online travel agencies to drive bookings for key stakeholders, including downtown hotels, and to generate RFPs from meeting planners — the DMO's primary business-events audience, pitched on Seattle's headquarters roster of Amazon, Starbucks and Nordstrom.

On the leisure side, the DMO targets what it calls "adventure culturists," positioning the city's 200 miles of shoreline, 6,000 acres of parks and 28% tree canopy as a combined urban-nature proposition. Last year's "Mother Nature's City" campaign ran across print, digital, outdoor, streaming video and social, including interactive Hulu/Disney ads where viewers chose a Seattle ASMR soundtrack.

The Seahawks' Super Bowl run has already delivered unpaid national exposure, with city imagery in every broadcast. "We're proud of our team and proud of how our city has shown up for the moment," Byington said.

The test for 2026 is whether soccer-driven awareness converts into measurable room nights from the UK and India once the tournament ends.