How Afia Arabia turned the World Cup into a 42-million-view food tournament

Every World Cup creates a second competition away from the pitch. As national teams fight for progression, brands fight for association. Sponsors activate global rights, advertisers recruit football stars, creators fill social feeds and companies search for some credible way to attach themselves to the cultural moment. Against that backdrop, a cooking-oil brand might not appear to have the most obvious route into football. But Afia saw the connection differently.

The brand noticed that the World Cup does not only happen in stadiums. It happens in homes, around screens, between friends and families. Matches create gatherings, and gatherings create food occasions. That gave an everyday product category a credible point of entry.

The question was no longer how to make cooking oil look like football. It was how to take the behaviours that make a football tournament compelling and rebuild them around the way people gather and eat. The result was Afia Mondial 2026.

One tournament on the pitch. Another online.

Afia Mondial was built as a social-first cooking tournament inspired by the structure of the World Cup. 8 Saudi-based food creators and chefs were assigned national teams through an opening draw.

Teasers introduced the match-ups, competitive banter created early rivalries and the creators then moved into head-to-head cooking rounds. Rather than borrowing football aesthetics and stopping there, Afia borrowed its mechanics.

There were teams. There were opponents. There were rounds. There was progression. There was commentary. And, crucially, there were supporters who could affect the result. While one competition was unfolding on the football pitch, another was taking place in audiences’ feeds.

Traditional influencer marketing often asks creators to deliver essentially the same branded message to eight different audiences. Afia instead gave eight creators a reason to compete and gave eight communities a reason to care who won.

The food was built around the occasion

The cooking challenges were not arbitrary recipe demonstrations. They centred on dishes and platters suited to gatherings and hosting, reflecting how many people were experiencing the tournament itself. The competition developed across three culinary stages:

Round 1: Appetizers → Round 2: Main courses → Final: Desserts

Creators prepared the dishes using Afia products, including its locally farmed Al Jouf oil, regular cooking oil and spices. The cook-offs were then edited into 2-to-3-minute social videos.

This gave the product an unusually functional role in the creative idea. Afia did not need to interrupt the entertainment to explain why its products were there.

Audiences were already watching food creators cook and already paying attention to recipes and ingredients. The product appeared because the competition required cooking.

Then Afia gave the tournament a voice

One of the campaign’s more distinctive devices came from another familiar part of football: sports commentary.

Afia recruited a popular food creator known for his distinctive voice and witty recipe narration to become the tournament’s dedicated commentator.

It was entertaining, but its strategic role was more important. With multiple creators producing content across different rounds, the commentator gave the campaign continuity. He made separate cook-offs feel like parts of the same event.

The creators became the teams. The cooking challenges became the matches. The followers became supporters. The commentator connected the entire tournament.

The audience was not asked just to watch

The most consequential decision was to give the audience control. After each cook-off, viewers were directed to Instagram to vote for the creator they wanted to progress.

The vote determined the next stage of the competition. That created a fundamentally different relationship with the content.

A follower could watch a creator compete, choose a side, vote, wait for the result and then return for the next round.

The campaign had built its own reason for repeat attention. 7 separate interactive giveaway posts added further opportunities to participate, with Afia product gift baskets offered as prizes.

Across the campaign, 21 Reels ran through Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, supported by Instagram Stories.

Organic creator distribution was reinforced by paid amplification across Instagram and TikTok, including teaser, promotional and countdown content. But the media plan was supporting the competition, not replacing it.

Did that structure actually make a difference?

Before the campaign, Afia’s measured social content generated 5.3 million public views, alongside 15.9K engagements, 342 comments and 3.8K shares across the retained pre-campaign posts.

Afia set a campaign target of 40 million views. It delivered 42 million-plus views and more than 65 million impressions. That was almost 8 times its pre-campaign view baseline.

The behavioural metrics moved more sharply still. The campaign generated 90K tracked engagements, 5K comments and 12.2K shares, alongside 29,936 Instagram votes.

Against Afia’s pre-campaign benchmark, engagement increased 465 per cent, comments rose 1,365.5 per cent and shares increased 221.8 per cent.

The significance is not simply that more people saw the brand. More people did something with what they saw. They commented. They shared. Nearly 30,000 votes were cast to influence the competition itself.

A smaller brand idea competing with football-star firepower

The competitive context makes that performance particularly interesting. Afia was not operating in an empty category conversation.

Major F&B brands were already activating around the World Cup, many with direct football credentials and globally recognisable talent.

Lay’s combined international names such as Messi and Beckham with Saudi football stars including Salem Al-Dawsari in its 2026 activity. Coca-Cola, KFC, McDonald’s and other major food and beverage advertisers were also competing for tournament attention.

Yet within the specific set of competitor World Cup posts tracked during Afia Mondial’s campaign window, Afia recorded the largest Share of Voice at 65.7 per cent, based on captured public views.

The next-highest brand in the tracked set, Kellogg’s Noodles, recorded 12.1 per cent, followed by Lay’s Arabia at 11.2 per cent and Coca-Cola at 9.9 per cent.

Brands with football sponsorships and famous athletes had an immediate route to relevance. Afia had neither advantage built into its category. What it had was a format designed to make people participate.

The creators mattered because they were creators, not celebrities

There is a useful distinction here for influencer marketers. Football stars bring enormous fame. Food creators bring something different: contextual authority and communities already organised around the behaviour the product belongs to.

For Afia, a chef preparing an appetizer or dessert with cooking oil could make the brand part of the action in a way that a famous face simply holding the product could not. And because those creators already had loyal followers, the competition gave those communities a reason to activate that loyalty.

The campaign did not ask the creators merely to extend Afia’s reach. It used the relationship between creators and their audiences as part of the campaign mechanic itself.

The clearest result was the one Afia did not pay for

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the format travelled beyond media delivery came from outside the original roster. Afia contracted 8 creators.

During the campaign, 14 additional creators and public figures joined organically without payment. Contracted creators also continued posting beyond their agreed deliverables.

The campaign additionally generated around 15K new followers across Instagram and TikTok.

That creates a more useful effectiveness chain than views alone:

42M+ views → deeper interaction → 29,936 votes → 15K new followers → 14 unpaid creators joining voluntarily

A brand can buy impressions. It can negotiate creator deliverables. What it cannot put into a media contract is the decision of people outside that agreement to join because the idea itself looks worth participating in.

The lesson is not “build a tournament”

The obvious takeaway would be to copy the format. That would miss the point. What Afia Mondial demonstrates is the value of identifying the behaviour underneath a cultural event.

The World Cup is compelling because people choose sides. They anticipate the next match. They debate. They support personalities and teams. They care about progression. They come back because the outcome remains unresolved.

Afia translated those behaviours into its own category. And it found the bridge in something ordinary but culturally powerful: people gathering around food while they watched the tournament.

That is why the campaign’s strongest result is not necessarily 42 million views, or even a 65.7% Share of Voice within its tracked competitive set.

It is that an everyday cooking-oil brand found a credible way to make itself part of World Cup behaviour without pretending to be a football brand. One match was happening on the field. Afia gave people another one to follow online.

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CREDITS:

Client: Afia Arabia

Content creator partners:
@sultan_x220

@craftedbyomar

@cookwithdhaen

@dipsntrips

@sarahinnawi

@ananno89

@ghofran.alromaihy

@healthway_22

@dinaalrayes