The best TV ads don’t just generate awareness. They generate searches.

When a high-impact campaign airs, viewers immediately turn to Google, YouTube, and other platforms to learn more, find products, or continue engaging with a brand. The challenge isn’t generating that interest. It’s being ready to capture it.

A recent World Cup campaign from Fox Sports shows exactly how this process works — and why SEO and PPC planning need to start long before an ad goes live.

A World Cup ad that created more than awareness

On May 13, creative intelligence platform DAIVID published new data ranking the most emotionally engaging World Cup ads released so far, and Fox Sports’ promo “Miracle” led the field by a clear margin.

DAIVID tested 31 World Cup ads released online and ranked them by the intensity of positive emotions they generated, the measure most closely linked to long-term brand impact. Here’s how the top five shook out:

Rank	Brand	Campaign	Intense positive emotional responses
1	Fox Sports	“Miracle“	56.1%
2	Lay’s	“The Most Epic Watch Party“	52.1%
3	Coca-Cola	“Bubbling Up“	51.6%
4	Hisense	“Out Host“	50.9%
5	Budweiser	“The Big Drop“	50.4%
—	Industry norm	—	48.7%

Adidas’ “Backyard Legends” and Pepsi’s “Football Nation Is Here” narrowly missed making the top five. DAIVID will update the rankings throughout the tournament, meaning the creative competition is far from over.

But that table shouldn’t just be an advertising scorecard. It also represents a demand map. Every brand in the top five is generating search interest right now, weeks before the World Cup kicks off on June 11. The question isn’t whether their branded terms are seeing spikes in traffic, but whether their search teams are ready for it.

Now, let’s talk about that Fox spot in a bit more detail. Created by Fox Sports Marketing and Special US, and directed by Lance Acord, “Miracle” imagines Team USA doing the unthinkable: winning the World Cup, including a dramatic 3-2 victory over five-time champion Brazil in the 97th minute. 

U.S. soccer star Christian Pulisic sends in a corner kick, the ball is headed home in the dying seconds, and the country erupts. Soccer players end up on currency. Times Square is taken over by revelers.

Then, just as reality starts to reassert itself, in walks Mike Eruzione, captain of the legendary 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that miraculously beat the Soviet Union against all odds, with the only line the ad needed: “What? You don’t believe in miracles?”

The spot is set to Elvis Presley’s “The Impossible Dream.” Yes, really. They lean hard into Americana. And it works.

When DAIVID ran it through its AI-powered creative testing platform, trained on tens of millions of human responses, “Miracle” earned a creative effectiveness score (CES) of 6.99 out of 10, placing it in the top 14% of all ads ever tested by the platform, well above the industry average of 5.8. 

It generated intense positive emotions in 56.1% of viewers, 15.2% higher than the average ad. It held attention all the way to the end, with 66.9% still watching in the final three seconds versus an industry norm of 58.2%. Viewers were also 35% more likely to remember Fox as the brand behind it.

Three emotions drove its success: excitement (+85%), hope (+72%), and pride (+61%), all significantly above industry averages.

Ian Forrester, CEO and founder of DAIVID, puts it plainly: 

• “The conventional wisdom in advertising is that you make people laugh, or you make them cry. These are the reliable emotional levers. Hope is harder. It asks the audience to believe in something, which is a big ask in this time of economic and political turmoil. Fox Sports didn’t just clear that bar, they set a new one.”

That’s a masterclass in emotional advertising. It highlights a direct business problem that needs solving — fast.

Dig deeper: Why most video ads fail — and what video metrics actually matter

Why this is a search marketing problem, not just an advertising one

Here’s what happens the moment that Fox spot airs during a major broadcast window: millions of viewers grab their phones. They search “U.S. World Cup 2026,” “Christian Pulisic,” “Fox World Cup schedule,” “Mike Eruzione 1980,” “The Impossible Dream Elvis,” and dozens of other queries the Fox search team may or may not have prepared for.

According to a white paper called “TV Ads and Search Spikes: Toward a Deeper Understanding,” 75% of incremental search activity occurs within the first two minutes of an ad airing. Not the first hour. The first two minutes.

If your search campaign isn’t already live, optimized, and fully funded at that moment, you won’t just miss the opportunity, you’ll actively route warm, brand-interested traffic to your competitors.

This is the fundamental strategic failure that still plagues most organizations: Search marketing is treated as a last-click discipline, siloed from the creative and media teams that generate demand upstream. Search is the digital bridge for video-driven interest. Far too many brands let that bridge wash out every time a high-impact ad airs.

4 query types TV ads generate (and how to prepare for them)

The “Miracle” spot is instructive because it generates not one type of search query, but four distinct categories, each requiring a different strategic response.

Branded queries 

These are the most obvious searches you’ll see after an ad airs: “Fox Sports,” “Fox World Cup.” Basically, they’re your brand terms. If you’re Fox, you’re already winning these. But are you capturing 100% of impressions? 

Budget should surge the moment an ad goes live to absorb the volume spike, with established brands expecting up to a 20% lift in branded search volume during a major campaign.

Campaign queries 

These searches emerge from the creative itself, such as “U.S. wins World Cup,” “Miracle ad,” or “Impossible Dream commercial.”

They only exist because the ad aired. If Fox’s search team didn’t prebuild landing pages and keyword groups around these terms before the first broadcast, they left money on the table.

Asset queries 

Viewers often search for memorable elements featured in the creative, including songs, athletes, celebrities, or story references.

For the Fox ad, these might look like “song in Fox World Cup ad,” “who is Mike Eruzione,” “Christian Pulisic World Cup commercial.”

Viewers searching for the Elvis track or the 1980 hockey captain are highly engaged, highly curious, and highly convertible. These queries need to be anticipated in keyword planning sessions — not discovered two weeks after launch.

Category queries 

Some viewers skip the brand entirely and search for solutions, products, or viewing options related to the campaign’s broader theme.

For the Fox ad these might look like “how to watch World Cup 2026,” “World Cup streaming options,” “where to watch U.S. soccer.” 

A viewer, emotionally moved by “Miracle,” who then searches for one of these terms and lands on a competitor’s streaming service would be a direct cost of poor planning. 

Bidding only on brand terms during a TV flight while ignoring category-level terms is, bluntly, strategic negligence.

Dig deeper: AI for video advertising: 5 best practices for PPC campaigns

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The 10/90 rule: Technology is the easy part

The good news is that search platforms now offer automated tools to sync bidding with broadcast schedules, detect search spikes, and adjust budgets in real time.

The bad news is that these tools may do about 10% of the actual work. The other 90% is human, and it has to happen before the ad airs.

That means you need to be in the room when the creative is being storyboarded to:

• Flag searchable hooks, such as songs, athletes, and visual gags, that will need keyword coverage.
• Prebuild landing pages that maintain visual and verbal continuity with the broadcast creative.
• Align search, video, and content teams around the questions viewers are likely to ask after seeing the ad.

Getting that alignment right matters. A viewer who searches “Fox Miracle ad” and lands on a generic programming grid will bounce immediately. The cognitive dissonance alone kills the conversion.

Viewers are also increasingly asking conversational questions triggered by video content.  Using our example, these might include “how does the Fox streaming app work,” “who plays in the World Cup this summer,” or “is Christian Pulisic injured.”

YouTube descriptions, structured metadata, and FAQ content need to be optimized for these queries before a campaign launches, not after.

Measuring what matters

While traditional TV metrics measure exposure, branded search volume measures intent. These are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes in modern marketing.

The right framework is a Branded Search Lift Model (BSLM):

• Establish a rigorous baseline using 90 to 120 days of historical data (not the standard four weeks, which is too short to control for seasonality).
• Apply a time-series forecasting model to project expected volume without advertising.
• Measure the gap between expected and observed searches during and after the campaign.

That gap, incremental search lift, is your most honest signal of whether the creative is working. It can also serve as a diagnostic tool to identify where the funnel is leaking.

For “Miracle,” the emotional data suggests the spot will generate significant search activity across all four query categories, particularly for asset and category queries. 

The hope-and-pride emotional signature that DAIVID identified tends to drive social sharing, which in turn drives a fourth conversion pathway: 

• TV → Social → Search → Conversion. 

That means hashtag volume and social mentions should be tracked alongside search lift as correlated signals of a campaign that’s genuinely breaking through.

Dig deeper: The SEO shift you can’t ignore: Video is becoming source material

The feedback loop that changes everything

Here’s where this gets genuinely exciting: The relationship between TV creative and search data is reciprocal.

Search lift data is a low-cost, real-time proof of concept for your most expensive media investments. By running small-scale tests on YouTube or CTV and monitoring branded search lift for each creative variant, teams can identify which ads actually trigger digital action before committing massive budgets to traditional broadcast.

Conversely, TV performance data can and should inform search strategy. If “Miracle” generates a 60%+ spike in branded search, as emotionally resonant ads have been shown to do, that’s not just a media win. 

It’s a creative brief for the next campaign, a signal about which emotional levers to pull again, and evidence that should be sitting in front of every senior marketer and media planner in the organization.

The brands winning this game aren’t treating search and video as separate disciplines. They’re running them as a single, integrated demand engine. Video creates curiosity, search captures it, and data from both channels sharpens the creative for whatever comes next.

Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth officer at DAIVID, frames the opportunity well: 

• “For tentpole events like the World Cup, it’s a smart move to think more strategically about the relationship between TV and SEM. When effectiveness testing shows you’ve got a genuine firecracker of a TVC on your hands, that’s the moment to tighten the connection even further. This highly emotive Fox Sports campaign is a powerful reminder of the link between emotionally resonant advertising and uplifts in next-step intent.”

Search belongs in the creative brief

Fox’s “Miracle” spot works because it dares viewers to feel something unfashionable. Hope. Possibility. The audacity of imagining a different outcome.

Search marketers should take the same lesson to heart when approaching their counterparts in TV and video. Stop waiting to be invited to the post-launch debrief. Walk into the creative brief. Ask what’s searchable. Plan the SERP with the same rigor applied to the media buy.

The dance has already started. The question is whether you’re going to watch from the bleachers while your competitors capture every lead you paid to generate, or whether you’re going to join in.