This is Contagious

Budgets will be wasted. Brands will be ruthlessly filtered out. The real game starts after full time.

James Kirkham, founder of Iconic and ex-head of Copa90, joins Contagious to unpack why the 2026 World Cup is fundamentally different to previous tournaments - and what brands need to do about it.

This episode explores the new playbook for World Cup marketing, where winning isn’t about owning the biggest moment, but creating the conversations, emotions and cultural ripples that keep spreading long after the final whistle. .

We’ll explain:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

In this episode, Contagious investigates what happens when content supply completely outstrips human attention, and how brands can win in a world dominated by infinite scroll, clip farms, AI slop and algorithmic overload.

Along the way, we’ll explore why Universe 25’s infamous rodent utopia experiments feel eerily relevant to modern media, why today’s attention panic may simply be history repeating itself, and why the real problem might not be shrinking attention spans but a zero tolerance reaction to boring content.

We’ll explain:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Pokemon. Meatball lollipops. 17th Century silk traders. In this episode, Contagious explores weird and wonderful brand collabs, why they’re so effective, how to use them as a shortcut to cultural relevance and which brands are doing them well.  

Discover the psychology behind ‘optimal incongruence’, how brands like Supreme and Crocs turned collaborations into a business model, and why technology has raised the cultural bar for collabs.

Along the way, we dive into:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.

Nostalgia. Cultural déjà vu. Kidulting. Why are so many people desperate to escape the present? In this episode, Contagious investigates everything from why adults are rebuilding their teenage bedrooms, to landlines for kids and the return of the iPod, and revealing why the past has become one of culture’s most powerful refuges.

Along the way, we unpack Happy Meals for adults, the psychology of anemoia, and why brands are increasingly selling comfort, tactility and emotional safety.

We’ll explain:

If you work in marketing, you should almost definitely subscribe to Contagious IQ - an intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies supercharge their creativity by learning from the world's most impactful brands, campaigns and trends.