For brand marketing teams, content strategists, and YouTube channel managers watching this tournament closely: Domino's, LEGO, Lay's, DoorDash, and McDonald's are running some of the most creative World Cup 2026 campaigns in years. The briefs are smart, the casts are star-studded, and the production is world-class. But uploading a TV spot to YouTube and running paid ads around it is not a YouTube strategy. Each of these brands had a genuine opportunity to build something that compounds on their owned YouTube channel, and most of them left it on the table. Here is the creative work, the gap, and what a real YouTube strategy could have looked like for each one.