AdMiration feature: BBC’s “Let’s Make It Iconic” & ITV’s “American Road Trip”

For this week's AdMiration feature we did something a little different. We looked at two films that aren't really ads in the conventional sense — the BBC's “Let's Make It Iconic” and ITV's “American Road Trip,” the two title films the UK's free-to-air broadcasters made to launch their coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2026.

We set aside our usual Sales Impact and Brand Impact lens and looked instead at what these films are built to do: stand out, pull people in emotionally and get fans excited.

Read on to learn how the films were received based on our data.

BBC — “Let's Make It Iconic”

The film opens on a street scene alive with Brazilian supporters, when large drums painted in the green and yellow of the Brazilian flag come into view — the first of the everyday objects the BBC calls “fanvases.” As the camera moves across them, a hand-painted Pelé comes to life on the drum skins, folk art rather than broadcast footage.

Stickers and cut-out players spread onto walls, pipes and drains, as though the tournament is seeping into the fabric of the city. Scarves, enamel pin badges and woven fabric carry players into the texture of daily life, and the film widens out across national colors and cultures. 

Some of soccer’s most iconic moments burst into life across these objects — Brazil's 1970 team goal, Iniesta's last-gasp winner, Bergkamp's wonder strike and a fictional clash between Maradona and Haaland — each held up like a treasured artifact.

The film builds to its biggest “fanvas” of all: a giant tifo — the kind of huge fan-made banner normally seen across stadium stands — draped down on a residential tower block, depicting seven likely stars of this year's tournament.

It closes on the BBC's branding alongside the FIFA World Cup 2026 logo, with the BBC named on screen as the tournament's official UK broadcaster.

ITV — “American Road Trip”

The film opens in a warm, cinematic desert, placing viewers in the middle of a North American road movie. A retro van pulls onto the open road and becomes the thread of the whole sequence, heading down the highway and Route 66-style stretches, past diners, motels and roadside towns.

Bobblehead soccer players sit on the dashboard, bringing humor and soccer heritage along for the ride. Shot on 16mm, the open-road footage is intercut with famous faces and moments from World Cup history and layered with five decades of ITV commentary, spanning Pelé in 1970 through to Messi in 2022. 

The journey carries viewers across all three host nations — the deserts and highways of the United States, into Mexico and up through Canada — building the sense of scale as the van presses on. 

The van reaches its destination as the film resolves on MetLife Stadium — the New Jersey venue that will host the final — and the FIFA World Cup 2026 logo, the whole sequence carried by Rascal Flatts' cover of “Life Is a Highway.”

Both films were made to do the same job — announce a free-to-air broadcaster's World Cup coverage — yet they reach for the moment from different directions.

The BBC's “Let's Make It Iconic,” created by in-house agency BBC Creative with animation studio Blinkink and illustrator Dan Evans, puts the World Cup in the hands of fans. Evans is known for designing real in-stadium tifos for clubs like Arsenal and the England women's rugby team, and that craft sensibility runs through the whole film. 

The everyday objects of support — stickers, scarves, pin badges, drums — become "fanvases," surfaces on which soccer’s history is painted, stitched and collected. 

The film is a deliberate continuation of BBC Creative's BAFTA-winning Women’s Euros work “Names Will Be Made,” which used the same handcrafted, practical-animation approach. In a year when AI-generated imagery is everywhere, the BBC leaned the other way on purpose. As creative director Tom Espezel put it: “In a landscape of AI, it felt more important than ever to focus on craft and celebrate the effort that goes into every expression of fandom.”

ITV took the journey itself as its subject. Produced by Noah Media Group and directed by Tim Mackenzie-Smith, the “American Road Trip” title sequence frames the 2026 tournament — the first hosted across the USA, Canada and Mexico — as a cross-country adventure. 

Shot on 16mm and scored to Rascal Flatts' cover of “Life Is a Highway,” the version made famous by the Disney film “Cars,” it leans into Americana, intercutting open-road imagery with archival World Cup moments and five decades of ITV commentary. 

That road-trip framing is intentional: ITV is broadcasting the tournament live from a custom-built rooftop studio in Brooklyn, fronted by Mark Pougatch, Laura Woods and Semra Hunter, so the titles literally drive viewers to the New York base where its coverage lives.

The films come alive with soccer fans 

Across the total audience both films perform mostly in line with the average UK ad. But when we look at soccer fans, the picture lifts considerably, with nearly every metric turning significantly above norm. 

We typically suggest that a World Cup sponsor aim for broad appeal — rather than appeal with just soccer fans — for its ads to have the intended impact on sales and long-term brand equity. But a broadcaster's pre-tournament film is a different kind of asset to a sponsor's ad. 

The audience for World Cup coverage on the BBC and ITV is, by its nature, already tuned in to soccer — so the people these films resonate with most are precisely the people who'll be watching when they air. 

The creative connected powerfully with that engaged audience, at exactly the moment it reaches them — a sign the work is doing what it set out to do.

Relevance and Enjoyment show this most clearly. Both sit right around the norm across the total audience and then jump significantly above it once you isolate soccer fans. 

Relevance — how much the film feels personally meaningful — climbs from 3.6 to 4.0 for the BBC and from 3.6 to 4.1 for ITV. Enjoyment follows the same path, rising from 3.8 to 4.1 for the BBC and from 3.8 to 4.2 for ITV. 

Both cut through a crowded moment

The BBC and ITV have shared UK World Cup rights since 1966, and this year they go head to head across the biggest tournament in the competition's history split almost evenly between them (BBC 54 live games, ITV 51). With the same tournament free on both channels, each film competes to set the tone and become the one viewers most associate with the World Cup.

Among soccer fans, both films are distinctive (3.9 vs 3.7). What's notable is how each film achieves its distinctiveness, because they got there by different routes. 

The BBC's distinctiveness is built on craft. It renders soccer's history by hand — painted onto drums, knitted into scarves, pressed into enamel badges and animated frame by frame across the everyday objects fans actually own. 

The film used real knitting experts, badge makers and stop-motion animators in a year when polished, synthetic imagery is everywhere. That handmade look is the differentiator and what makes it feel human.

ITV gets there through mood and atmosphere. It takes a familiar genre — the cinematic American road movie — scores it with an equally familiar track and bends the whole thing around the World Cup so the film plays less like a promo and more like a short movie.

One stands out by how it's made, the other by where it takes you.

Nostalgia is the shared engine 

For two films built on different ideas, they both lean on memorable soccer moments. The BBC does it through old commentary and hand-painted legends; ITV does it through archival footage.

The commentary and historic players were repeatedly referenced as what people liked best about the BBC film:

• “It was colorful and attention grabbing and the audio clips of commentators like John Motson and Barry Davies brought back good memories. The animation was very cleverly done. The editing was seamless.”

• “I loved the display of legends like Maradona and Pele." 

• “I liked the inclusion of iconic moments that spread across several years. People of several age groups will be able to relate to that.”

For ITV, the retro footage and music were repeatedly named as what people liked most about the film:

• “I liked the retro feel... the old footage, the colors, the iconic places and players. It gave a nostalgic feel and maybe reinforced the love of the game.”

• “I like how it showed iconic moments from many World Cup tournaments in the past. It showed the new World Cup like Argentina to old world cup winners like Diego Maradona.”

It's a reminder that you don't have to manufacture excitement for a new tournament when soccer’s own history does the emotional work for you.

Music does the heavy lifting

While most scores we measured sit around average for the total audience, music is the exception. Both films achieve a strong score on Musical Appeal overall (BBC 4.0; ITV 4.1 vs. 3.7 norm), and it climbs higher still with soccer fans (BBC 4.1; ITV 4.3).

The music made an impact in both films, and again we see that both films made very different choices. ITV went with the familiar: the music does the same job as the retro footage around it, pulling on memory, and fans felt it. One loved “the nostalgic music of Rascal Flatts from Cars with the World Cup being in America.” It’s a recognizable song carrying its own memories into the film.

The BBC went the other way. Its track is “Somewhere Else” by Tomora — the brand-new project from Aurora and The Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands, released only months before the film. 

So while ITV's song reaches back like its footage does, the BBC pairs its nostalgic imagery with something current and hooky. The memory lives in the pictures while the music keeps it feeling iconic right now, with one respondent saying: “the music is now stuck in my head!”

The BBC turns craft into emotion, ITV builds it on the journey

Among soccer fans both films land warm and almost identically — the BBC scores 66 on Overall Emotion and ITV 67, against a 49 norm, with Love at 41% and 42% respectively (vs. a 28% norm). What differs is the shape of that warmth, and the second-by-second traces show it clearly.

Love holds warm right through the BBC film, with the clearest spikes landing when the hand-drawn legends wheel away celebrating a goal, and when live footage of a real fan transforms into an illustrated icon coming to life. 

One respondent captured the effect: “It made football come alive like I have ever seen. Past and current football stars were all animated and showing incredible skills. Makes you feel part of the tournament.” It's a montage, so the feeling refreshes with each new legend rather than building to one peak.

In the ITV film, Love climbs each time the archival match footage appears and spikes on the chorus of “Life Is a Highway,” before settling as the old footage blends into present-day scenes across Mexico, Canada and the United States. The feeling builds with the journey and peaks at the high points, the way a good road trip does.

Where the creative leaves its mark 

Ultimately, both films had the same job: to land the free-to-air promise that the broadcaster helps fans experience the tournament's biggest moments as they happen. Both films scored similarly on clarity and believability of their key messages (Key Message Clarity: BBC 4.0, ITV 4.1; Key Message Believability: BBC 4.0, ITV 4.0).

Where they diverge is in what the creative made people think about the broadcaster. Both films position the brands as “entertaining” (BBC 57%, ITV 65%) and as “capturing iconic moments” (BBC 46%, ITV 58%) — no surprise, given how much soccer history both lean on. 

But ITV's road-trip narrative pulls ahead on “bringing people together” (54% vs 47%) and “telling great stories” (44% vs 37%), while the BBC's film, rooted in fan craft and its standing as a public broadcaster, takes “trust” (41% vs 36%).

For all their differences — the BBC earning its warmth by hand, ITV earning it on the open road — the two films land the same core promise and almost identical emotion scores among soccer fans. 

And both got there by trusting what they already do best: the BBC its BAFTA-winning handmade craft, ITV its decades of music-led, cinematic World Cup openers — a reminder that a strong creative signature, played with conviction, beats reinvention.

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