At a Glance
- Sparks EVP of Account Direction Lisa Lundeen authored a new op-ed for Advertising Week on what the World Cup revealed about trust as a marketing metric.
- Her piece draws on The Belief Gap™ research from The Freeman Company — Sparks’ parent brand — which found nearly three-quarters of marketers see a real gap between brand recognition and genuine belief.
- Her take: in a summer defined by spectacle, the brands that mattered most weren’t the biggest — they were the ones people actually trusted.
Brands poured more into experiential marketing around the 2026 World Cup than almost any event before it — fan festivals, hospitality programs, city-wide activations across all 16 host cities. But size and spectacle were never the real test. The harder question was which of those experiences actually earned belief, not just attention.
This week, Advertising Week published an op-ed from Sparks EVP of Account Direction Lisa Lundeen on exactly that distinction. Her argument: awareness has gotten easier to generate than ever, but convincing people has gotten harder — and that gap is now measurable. She points to The Belief Gap™ research from The Freeman Company — Sparks‘ parent brand — that defines the distance between brand awareness and genuine brand belief. Its findings back up her argument: nearly three-quarters of marketers confirm the gap exists, and close to half point to a lack of meaningful in-person experience as one of the primary reasons it persists.
Why Physical Experience Is Getting More Valuable, Not Less
Lundeen argues that gap is exactly why physical experience is becoming more valuable, not less, as AI makes digital content easier to fake — and why something as unglamorous as queue management or accessibility planning can end up shaping brand perception as much as the big moment on stage.
From there, her piece builds out the fuller case: why real-world experiences read as harder to fake than anything online, how shared moments among crowds create social proof that spreads trust rather than just content, and what it actually takes to design belief into an experience on purpose rather than hope it shows up as a byproduct.
Read Lisa Lundeen’s full op-ed on Advertising Week.
