Small But Mighty
Hernán Tantardini, CMO of PepsiCo’s U.S. Lay’s & Food Portfolio.
PepsiCo
At the midpoint of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, soccer fever is everywhere: On television and streaming feeds, in the news, on social media and at the grocery store. I talked to Hernán Tantardini, CMO of PepsiCo’s U.S. Lay’s & Food Portfolio, about how Lay’s has been capturing the American fan—a plan put together even before the U.S. Men’s National Team hit the pitch and energized the nation. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.
How do you present the message of coming together, enjoying the game and being a part of the excitement, especially to U.S. consumers who might not already be the biggest soccer fans?
Tantardini: We focus on a consumer insight that is pretty close to Americans: the bandwagon fan. [They are] fans that change based on how a team is progressing—I just enjoy the game. With Lay’s, we are inviting everyone to jump into the Lay’s bandwagon. Enjoy the game. Get together. Get a bag of chips, get with your friends and family. Support—obviously—the U.S.A. team, but you can support other teams if you want. Get together and enjoy. It’s different than the Super Bowl: This is a full 40 days of events. It’s 40 days of big soccer games.
How are you keeping people engaged with the brands over the course of the entire tournament?
We need to trust the teams to keep giving us a lot of positive news. We are all extremely happy with the first games of U.S.A.’s team.
We have huge in-store activations—2X the average stores we activate for a Super Bowl, close to 600,000. It’s a lot. They’re customized because there are regional nuances, different moments. Before the World Cup started, we [did] some consumer promotions to win sweepstakes and the possibility of getting World Cup tickets, even the final.
Then the second phase, the one that we are [in] right now. We want consumers to enjoy our product in a different way, so we’re inviting them to get some limited flavors from ‘Lay’s Around the World.’ At the stores, you can buy different World Cup flavor editions.
If you go to the stadiums, it’s a different experience. I was at the Argentina against Austria game. You can buy a flavor inspired [by] a sandwich that is sold at every single stadium in Argentina called choripán. It’s called Lay’s Table. You decide if you want your chips flat [or] wavy, then you choose the flavor that you want from around the world.
Once the teams start to [qualify for the knock-out round], we’re going to have a big social activation. We have a social war room—we want our brands to be super close and we’re working with personalization. We have a lot of people coming to America, and we want to talk to all of them. On the U.S.A. team, we [had] the No. 1 footprint in terms of share voice.
While we are communicating to Americans to be part of the party, we have a second campaign called ‘No Lay’s, No Game.’ We are using it for Hispanics in the U.S. with soccer celebrities. We have Messi, David Beckham, Thierry Henry, also. We call it the epic party. It’s a WhatsApp group with big soccer celebrities interacting. Everyone around the world can get in. So far, there were more than 5 million consumers in the group.
What advice would you give a CMO who is trying to hook their messaging into a large event like the World Cup?
- Planning. This is the second time we are the World Cup sponsors at Frito-Lay, but we have a lot of experience in other events. I connected with other sponsors that had a much longer experience in the World Cup. We were extremely close to the owner of the event: There’s no one that has more experience than FIFA. We want us to be successful, we want them to be successful.
- We decided to build a specific team beyond our core sports team: Their only job was organizing the World Cup activations. We decided to pull from the fantastic talent we have, people who really love sports and understand the culture of soccer.
- Keep on connecting during the tournament with other sponsors, just to learn what they are doing. We have been partnering, we are collaborating.