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Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

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Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

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Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

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From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

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Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

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What Is Data Analytics?
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We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

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Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
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We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
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As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.
Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

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The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

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Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.
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In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

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Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

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In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

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The FIFA World Cup draws more global attention than almost any other sporting event, and sponsors treat it as a defining platform for international brand visibility. At the 2026 tournament, three Chinese brands hold official sponsorship positions at FIFA 2026: Hisense, Lenovo, and Mengniu. Hisense and Lenovo invested in sustained activation outside China, while Mengniu concentrated its presence domestically. This analysis tracks Hisense and Lenovo's performance outside China across the pre-tournament period and the first two weeks of tournament play, from June 11 to 21 2026, using Meltwater Explore+.

Hisense Built Visibility Early, Then Converted It on Social

Lenovo Built Its Reach Through Third Party Channels

Chinese Brands in the Sponsor Field: A Mid-Tier Assessment

From Insight to Intelligence: How Meltwater Explore+ Helps

<table style="width:100%; border-collapse:collapse; font-family:Arial, sans-serif; font-size:14px;">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc; font-weight:bold; width:30%;">Capability</td>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc;"><a href="https://www.meltwater.com/en/products/explore-plus">Explore+</a></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc; font-weight:bold;">Analysis window</td>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc;">Tournament Weeks 1 &amp; 2 (June 11–21); Pre-Tournament Buzz (Jan–Jun 10)</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc; font-weight:bold;">Data sources</td>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc;">
        30 sources, including broadcast television and radio, online and print news, blogs, comments, reviews, forums, podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, X, Douyin, Red, YouTube, and more.
      </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc; font-weight:bold;">Brands / entities tracked</td>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc;">
        FIFA Partners and FIFA World Cup 2026 Sponsors
      </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc; font-weight:bold;">Language</td>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc;">English</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc; font-weight:bold;">Regions</td>
      <td style="padding:12px; border:1px solid #ccc;">Global, excluding China</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Hisense arrived at kick off with momentum already established. From March 2026, the brand ran localised activations across Japan, Australia, Italy, the UK, Thailand, and other markets, including giveaway campaigns tied to the viewing experience, creator partnerships, and a product launch anchored to the tournament. Between January 1 and June 10, Hisense recorded 18.3K mentions and 1.15 million engagements outside China via Meltwater Explore+.

Hisense’s giveaway posts encouraged fan participation online

During the first two weeks of the tournament, Hisense’s official sponsorship played a role in giving it more visibility, where its logo was shown during the matches and even featured on FIFA’s official social media account when they showed highlight clips. Visibility spiked, generating 7.5k mentions and 1.16 million engagements globally outside of China in the first 2 weeks. 

<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZwQv_Nijf7/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:16px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZwQv_Nijf7/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" style=" background:#FFFFFF; line-height:0; padding:0 0; text-align:center; text-decoration:none; width:100%;" target="_blank"> <div style=" display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; 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overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZwQv_Nijf7/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank">A post shared by FIFA World Cup (@fifaworldcup)</a></p></div></blockquote>
<script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script>

Logo placement during the matches gave Hisense greater visibility, even on official FIFA social media channels

As the tournament opened, news dominated Hisense's mention mix at 74%, driven by press releases and sponsored editorial tied to World Cup initiatives. Engagement told a different story. TikTok drove 509K engagements (43%) and Instagram 380K (33%), concentrated around FIFA's official accounts amplifying in game moments tagged to Hisense's RGB MiniLED technology, alongside creator partnerships and giveaways.

Why it matters: The gap between where Hisense was mentioned (news) and where audiences engaged (TikTok, Instagram) points to where the brand is actually building equity -  in social, not press. For brand teams benchmarking sponsorship ROI, tracking engagement by platform rather than total volume reveals where the investment is actually landing.

Lenovo's strongest moments in the first two weeks came from outside its own accounts. Football content creator pechefootball broke down Lenovo and FIFA's Football AI Pro tool, a large language model built on data from over 2,000 match and player metrics, generating one of the brand's highest engagement moments of the tournament through third party coverage rather than owned content. 

<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@pechefootball/video/7594584938851175703" data-video-id="7594584938851175703" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" > <section> <a target="_blank" title="@pechefootball" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@pechefootball?refer=embed">@pechefootball</a> The FIFA World Cup 2026™ just got even more competitive… 🤯😳  FIFA and Lenovo just rolled out a new LLM called Football AI Pro, built on data from over 2,000 match and player metrics, which will provide teams deep insights into tactics and stats like avg. distance covered, attempts on goal, avg. speed, and many more. Larger teams have a lot of analysts while smaller teams don’t, so Football AI Pro could help even things out and bring more surprising results.  @Lenovo @FIFA  <a title="lenovotechworld" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/lenovotechworld?refer=embed">#LenovoTechWorld</a> <a title="lenovopartner" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/lenovopartner?refer=embed">#LenovoPartner</a> <a title="lenovofifa" target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/lenovofifa?refer=embed">#LenovoFIFA</a> <a target="_blank" title="♬ original sound - Pêche Football" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7594584979481332502?refer=embed">♬ original sound - Pêche Football</a> </section> </blockquote> <script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>

Football content creator pechefootball breaking down Lenovo and FIFA's Football AI Pro tool

In Thailand, a Coca-Cola FIFA World Cup 2026 promotion featured the Lenovo Tab Gen3 as a headline prize alongside match tickets and a Honda Stargazer. Although the campaign ran under Coca-Cola's handle, the post recorded over 55,000 engagements, giving Lenovo meaningful consumer exposure through a partner's audience rather than its own.

The same pattern held in Japan. Promotional content for Lenovo's "RISE NOW" campaign featuring a collaboration between artist GAN (Takanori Iwata) and anime series Captain Tsubasa, which was posted across GAN's X and TikTok accounts rather than Lenovo's official channels. The content featured a short clip of the artist watching Japan's opening World Cup match on 15 June, earning 404K views and 8.4K engagements on X and 77K views and nearly 8K engagements on TikTok. 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="ja" dir="ltr">朝から集合してみんなで観戦!!⚽️📣<br><br>新曲「RISE NOW」ぜひ聴いてね🎧<a href="https://t.co/1Uuhg4JcZI">https://t.co/1Uuhg4JcZI</a> <a href="https://x.com/T_IWATA_EX_3JSB?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@T_IWATA_EX_3JSB</a><a href="https://x.com/hashtag/FIFAWorldCup?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FIFAWorldCup</a> <a href="https://x.com/hashtag/LenovoFIFA?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#LenovoFIFA</a> <a href="https://x.com/hashtag/GAN?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GAN</a> <a href="https://x.com/hashtag/%E5%B2%A9%E7%94%B0%E5%89%9B%E5%85%B8?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#岩田剛典</a> <a href="https://x.com/hashtag/GAN_RISENOW?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GAN_RISENOW</a> <a href="https://t.co/eBAHsVkjtZ">pic.twitter.com/eBAHsVkjtZ</a></p>&mdash; GAN(岩田剛典) Staff (@BMG__official_) <a href="https://x.com/BMG__official_/status/2066374561394991344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 15, 2026</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Lenovo’s “Rise Now" Campaign generated high engagement across key Japanese channels

A global partnership with David Beckham, announced 100 days before kick off, followed the same logic: the top post around the campaign recorded a Social Echo* score of 103K, reflecting strong cross platform sharing driven by editorial coverage rather than paid placement. 

*Social echo: a metric that measures how widely a news article is shared and engaged with across social networks after publication.

Over June 11–21, TikTok concentrated 78% of Lenovo's total engagements despite accounting for a smaller share of mentions. Broadcast television also delivered consistent name checks through the officially sponsored Lenovo Match Break hydration interval, while X carried regional account activity amplifying Lenovo's technology role in the tournament. The pattern across channels was consistent: Lenovo's reach was built through partners, creators, and third party platforms, with its own accounts playing a supporting rather than lead role.

Why it matters: Lenovo's biggest tournament moments came from creators, partners, and third party promotions rather than its own channels. For sponsorship teams, tracking earned and owned reach separately reveals which partnerships are actually doing the work, and where activation budgets are generating returns beyond the brand's own audience.

FIFA Partners and Sponsors: Engagement SOV

Among FIFA's full sponsor roster, engagement in the first two weeks was heavily concentrated at the top. AB InBev and Adidas together accounted for nearly three quarters of all sponsor engagement at 36% and 33.2% respectively. Below that, the field spreads across a mid-tier where the competition is genuinely open.

Hisense ranked 7th across the full sponsor field at 3.28% engagement share, while Lenovo sat 9th at 1.14%, a smaller footprint built on earned amplification and creator driven TikTok concentration. Mengniu registered 403 engagements outside China, reflecting its domestic first activation strategy. Both Hisense and Lenovo rank ahead of longer established sponsors including Visa and Hyundai-Kia, a credible position for brands still building global tournament presence.

Why it matters: Engagement share across the full sponsor field gives brand and marketing intelligence teams a more precise read on sponsorship ROI than mention volume alone. For Chinese brands using global sport as an internationalisation platform, tracking where that share moves across successive tournaments is how the return on long term investment becomes visible.

Use Case 1: Pre-Tournament Baseline Tracking

The Problem: Sponsorship visibility doesn't start at kick off. Brands that arrive at the tournament cold have already ceded ground.

Track mention volume and engagement cadence week by week in the pre-tournament window

Identify which markets are generating organic conversation ahead of paid activation

Business Outcome Activation spend is directed toward markets with demonstrated audience receptivity, not assumed ones.

Use Case 2: Platform Level Engagement Analysis

The Problem: Total engagement figures mask where brand equity is actually being built.

Break down engagement by platform and source type within Explore+

Separate earned and owned reach to understand which partnerships are generating returns

Business Outcome Sponsorship ROI reporting reflects actual audience behaviour rather than aggregated volume figures.

Use Case 3: Competitive Sponsor Benchmarking

The Problem: Without a comparative frame, individual brand numbers are difficult to contextualise within the wider sponsor field.

Track the full sponsor field simultaneously within a single Explore+ dashboard

Generate engagement share across the competitive set for any given time window

Business Outcome Sponsorship teams know where they sit in the field and can track movement in real time.

The first two weeks of FIFA 2026 produced a clear read on what global sponsorship returns when paired with global activation. Hisense and Lenovo both invested outside China and generated measurable visibility in return. Each took a different path — Hisense through volume and reach built across markets and platforms, Lenovo through earned amplification and creator driven concentration on TikTok — and both arrived at a credible mid-tier position in a competitive sponsor field. Mengniu's near absence outside China in the same window highlights how the sponsorship fee opens the door, but activation determines what comes through it. As the tournament moves into the knockout rounds, when audience attention peaks and every activation decision is most exposed, whether the momentum established in the first two weeks holds and grows is the question the remaining weeks will answer.

Which Chinese brands sponsored FIFA 2026, and how did their strategies differ?

Three Chinese brands held official sponsorship positions at FIFA 2026: Hisense, Lenovo, and Mengniu. Hisense and Lenovo built sustained activation outside China through localised campaigns, creator partnerships, and platform specific content, while Mengniu concentrated its presence domestically, reflecting a different read on what the sponsorship was meant to achieve.

Why did Mengniu have low global visibility?

Mengniu registered fewer than 500 engagements outside China across the first two weeks of FIFA 2026, according to Meltwater Explore+. This reflects a domestic-first activation strategy — Mengniu's core consumer base and distribution footprint is concentrated in China, making global reach a lower priority than domestic brand reinforcement.

Why does pre-tournament activity matter for tournament performance?

Visibility built before kick-off carries forward once a tournament starts. According to Meltwater Explore+ data, brands that sustained a steady activation cadence in the months leading up to FIFA 2026 entered the tournament with audience familiarity already established, which shaped how their coverage and engagement built from day one.

How can brand teams track sponsorship performance at major sporting events?

Meltwater Explore+ enables real time tracking across 30 source types including news, broadcast, and social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and X, across multiple brands simultaneously. Sponsorship teams can monitor mention volume, engagement share, platform mix, and competitor benchmarks within a single dashboard across any activation window.

How Hisense, Lenovo, and Mengniu approached the world's biggest sporting stage, and what the data shows

Chinese Sponsors at FIFA 2026: The First Two Weeks

A few years ago, the hard part was getting in the door. Through 2023, communications and marketing teams spent real energy building the case for generative AI: securing budget, clearing security review, and convincing leadership the investment would pay off. Today, most of those teams have the access they fought for, and then some. Adoption has outrun the rollout plans, with 71% of employees reporting they use AI tools at work that were never officially approved (Business Insider). 

So the real question has changed. It's no longer a question of whether your team can use AI. It's whether the AI is working with context that matters. For most organizations, the data context isn't ready: 58% describe their own data environment as chaotic, which means a confident-sounding answer may be built on stale, scattered, or unverified information. 

At Meltwater, we believe trusted intelligence should live wherever your team already works. That belief is why we built Meltwater MCP.

Here’s what we keep seeing: generic AI assistants answer from training data or from whatever they can crawl on the open web. They're fluent, fast, and often convincing. What they lack is the signals that drive decisions:  your brand, your market, the competitor who made a move this morning, and the judgment your team has spent years building.

There's a workaround, and plenty of teams use it. Someone logs in to Meltwater, runs the full workflow, exports a .CSV, and rebuilds the report by hand before the AI ever sees it. It works, and it'll keep working for the power users who know exactly what they need. But it's slow, it breaks the moment the context changes, and it puts a quiet quality-check burden back on the team. Most of the people who need a trusted answer would rather not run the whole workflow to get one. 

The missing piece is context. Your team already holds the most valuable part of it: the category knowledge, the relationships, the instinct for tone and timing. What's been missing is a clean way to bring trusted, current intelligence into the AI tools where that expertise already lives. 

Meltwater MCP closes that gap. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, an open industry standard for connecting AI assistants to the data and systems they work with. Think of it as shared plumbing the industry is adopting, not a product of ours. Meltwater MCP is built on that standard. It brings trusted, real-time Meltwater intelligence into the AI assistants your team already uses, including leading AI assistants, custom agents, and AI workflows, as a set of capabilities they can call on directly. 

The experience is straightforward. You ask a question in plain language, and you get an AI-generated answer with cited sources behind it, scoped to the products in your plan. Access grows with the Meltwater products you subscribe to. Meltwater MCP extends Meltwater into more of your organization, and it builds on the searches and assets your power users already maintain. The better that foundation, the better the answers it returns. 

This isn't new ground for us. Meltwater has supported MCP since 2025, when many teams were still hearing the term for the first time. Everything in this release is built on what we've learned running it with customers in the year since. 

When we started, we asked a handful of customers to map their Meltwater intelligence workflows so we could learn from them. One of them, a global consumer goods company whose products are probably in your kitchen, told us something I think about often: “We're not software experts. We sell ice cream.” They were right, and they shouldn't have to be software experts to get a trusted answer. 

That's the heart of what changes. With Meltwater MCP, that same team can plug in and work conversationally. Their expertise becomes the context. Their knowledge of the category, their voice, and their best practices combine with governed Meltwater data, and they can move from a question to a finished overview or a first draft in one place, work that used to mean clicking through several Meltwater screens and assembling it by hand.

Conversational brand and topic monitoring, asked the way you would ask a colleague. 

Sentiment and narrative reads on demand, grounded in current coverage.

A first-pass executive brief or content draft, built from what's being said about you right now.

The answers hold up, too. Narrative responses cite the coverage behind them, so your team can verify what they share and stand behind it at the leadership level. And trusted intelligence reaches the whole organization, not just the people who run the searches. We've already seen it: at a global home appliances brand, what began with a single analyst team spread across the company, with employees running their own internal hackathons on top of it.  

And it wasn't one company's idea. Across early programs at a global restaurant group and a pharmaceutical company, teams independently arrived at the same goal: a finished deliverable built inside their own AI environment, without the manual export step.

What makes these answers dependable is the content underneath them. Meltwater ingests more than 1.3 billion documents a day across news, social, web, and industries, in more than 240 languages, with the structure, governance, and historical depth behind it. Meltwater MCP grounds every answer in that licensed coverage and scopes it to what each customer subscribes to. It's one governed connection across the Meltwater portfolio, with authentication and tool permissions built in, so your team gains reach while you keep control.

The part I'm most excited about is the loop this creates. Our customers understand their business context better than anyone, and the more they bring it, the more we learn about the answers that matter to them. That feedback makes Meltwater MCP better for every team that uses it. It's how we deliver on the idea we started with: trusted intelligence, wherever your team works with AI.

Meltwater MCP is Meltwater's implementation of the open Model Context Protocol (MCP), which connects leading AI assistants, custom agents, and AI workflows to trusted, real-time Meltwater intelligence. It enables users to ask questions in natural language and receive AI-generated answers grounded in licensed media, social, and web data with source citations.

How is Meltwater MCP different from using leading AI assistants on their own?

General-purpose AI assistants primarily rely on their training data and publicly available information. Meltwater MCP augments those assistants with governed, up-to-date intelligence from your Meltwater subscription, giving responses access to current news, social conversations, brand monitoring, and other proprietary insights relevant to your business.

What can teams use Meltwater MCP for?
Teams can use Meltwater MCP to monitor brands and topics conversationally, analyze sentiment and emerging narratives, generate executive briefings, draft content, and answer business questions using current, trusted intelligence—all without manually exporting data from Meltwater first.

Why can organizations trust the answers generated through Meltwater MCP?

Meltwater MCP grounds responses in licensed, governed Meltwater content spanning news, social, web, and other sources, with citations that allow users to verify the underlying information. Access is scoped to each customer's Meltwater subscription and protected by built-in authentication and permissions, helping organizations balance AI productivity with governance.

Getting real time consumers insights used to be all about speed - faster alerts, faster dashboards, faster reports. But at Meltwater Summit 2026, a dozens of speakers gave us a more nuanced view of modern consumer intelligence. Speed is just table stakes, because everything happens fast these days. The marketers who understand consumers best are those who can spot a real signal, check it against what people actually care about, and move while the moment still has energy.

As Meltwater Chief Product Officer Chris Hackney put it during the product keynote, “Today, it’s not enough to only monitor the conversation. You need to understand signals fast and then act on them.”

That idea surfaced throughout the Summit in different ways. Social video, creators, AI search, private communities, misinformation, and cultural moments are all changing how people discover brands and decide who they trust. For marketing and communications teams, real-time consumer understanding has become part of how the business operates, not a report that lands after the conversation has already moved on.

Real-time insight starts with human behavior, not data points

Participation is not the same as connection

Data only matters when it changes a decision

The best ideas are excavated, not invented

Trust is now part of consumer intelligence

One of the clearest examples came from McDonald’s. Amanda Mulligan, who leads social strategy and creator marketing, described how the brand uses social listening to uncover what it calls “fan truths.”

Fan truths are the shared rituals, behaviors or core memories that all of our fans have together. There’s a lot of power in social media finding these insights, and they truly are the strategic backbone of every creative platform and idea that we do at McDonald’s.

That distinction is important. A trend tells you what people are doing right now. A truth helps you understand why they care in the first place.

For McDonald’s, real-time listening has helped validate ideas ranging from Adult Happy Meals to McNugget Caviar to the brand’s reaction to the “Grimace effect” around the New York Mets. Mulligan also made a useful point about restraint. Social listening can show a team what people are saying, but the team still has to decide whether the signal has enough weight behind it.

Social listening is an amazing tool for what I like to think is validation. Is this a trend, or is it an insight?

That is the difference between chasing the internet and actually reading the room. Real-time consumer intelligence should help teams avoid the trap of reacting to every meme, complaint, or spike in mentions. The real value comes from spotting the signals that connect to behavior, emotion, memory, and ritual.

The Summit also pushed marketers to rethink how they define an audience. In a session on YouTube and creator marketing, Andrew Peterson, Head of Creator Economy Ecosystem at YouTube, gave one of the simplest and most useful reframes of the event.

What I always say is replace the word algorithm with audience. Don’t worry about what the algorithm wants. What does the audience want?

That line gets at a pressure many brands feel every day. As discovery becomes more automated, personalized, and shaped by AI, marketers can end up optimizing for systems instead of people. Feeds, rankings, recommendations, and search results all shape what people see, but people still decide what feels useful, funny, credible, or worth sharing.

Peterson also emphasized that communities no longer fit into neat audience boxes. “Niche is the new mainstream,” he said. Someone may be the only fan of a specific topic in their town, then go online and find millions of people who love the same thing.

For marketers, that changes the job. It is no longer enough to say an audience is Gen Z, parents, travelers, sports fans, or beauty buyers. Teams need to understand what those people are doing in context: which creators they trust, which communities they join, which moments they amplify, and which language sounds natural rather than borrowed from a brief.

Bettina Garibaldi, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for the FIFA World Cup 2026 NYNJ Host Committee, made a similar point when discussing how brands can participate in the cultural momentum around the World Cup:

Participation is easy. Connection is hard.

That insight applies well beyond sports, as every major cultural moment attracts brands that want a seat at the table. Consumers can usually tell when a brand has earned that seat, and they can also tell when a brand is hovering around the edge of a conversation hoping to be noticed.

Garibaldi described the World Cup as more than a soccer tournament, a moment for music, fashion, food, lifestyle, local pride, and community. Serving as a useful reminder for real-time marketers that the obvious audience is rarely the whole audience, because soccer event can also be a food story, a travel story, a small business story, a creator story, and a neighborhood story all at once.

Understanding consumers in real time means finding those connected passion points early enough to do something thoughtful with them.

Another major Summit theme was the need to connect insights to action. Brittany Paxman, Managing Partner at Point600, argued that impact starts with better questions.

The organizations that have the best hypotheses for testing are the ones that see impact.

Real-time intelligence should start with a decision the business needs to make. Which audience should we prioritize? Which creator should we partner with? Which narrative is gaining credibility? Which issue needs leadership attention? Which product truth should shape the next campaign?

Cody Vogel, SVP of AI Strategy and Global Marketing at WE Communications, made the point in a practical way: “Look at a decision that you make, or your team makes, every single week… What insights would make that decision happen faster, better?”

That is a strong test for any marketing or communications team. If an insight does not help someone make a better call, it is still sitting at the information stage, and has not become intelligence yet.

The opportunity is to build systems that bring the right context to the right people at the right time. That could mean using social listening to validate a campaign idea, audience data to brief creators, media intelligence to guide reputation planning, or AI to cut down reporting time so people can spend more time interpreting what is actually going on.

Several speakers showed how real-time consumer understanding becomes especially powerful when teams connect cultural timing to brand truth. Mike Vizza, Head of Communications at Firehouse Subs, shared how the brand’s “Gravy Extinguisher” campaign turned a relatable holiday problem into a national media moment.

The best earned media ideas are not invented. They’re excavated, they’re built from the inside out.

The idea worked because it joined three things that already fit together: a real consumer problem, a timely cultural moment, and a brand heritage that made the response feel natural. People burn Thanksgiving turkeys. Firehouse Subs has firefighter roots. A gravy-filled extinguisher made immediate sense, like a joke that lands because it was true before anyone wrote the punchline.

That is the kind of insight brands should look for in real time. The question is not only what people are talking about. It is what your brand can credibly add that people might actually welcome.

Vizza’s advice also points to something teams sometimes forget. Real-time work usually takes preparation. The strongest moments often come from knowing the brand deeply, pressure-testing ideas before the pressure arrives, understanding what the audience finds funny or useful, and staying ready to adapt when the situation changes.

Real-time understanding also has to account for trust. Consumers are asking whether a message feels relevant, but they are also asking whether it feels real, whether there is a person behind it, and whether they should believe it.

Carmen Simon, Chief Science Officer at Enhancive, brought this down to the level of memory and decision-making. 

The brain only makes decisions based on what it remembers, not on what it forgets.

That is a practical challenge for brands using AI-generated or data-driven content. Getting attention and creating memory are two different jobs. Producing more content does not automatically create more meaning. If people cannot remember what a brand stands for, they are less likely to choose it when the moment comes.

Simon’s final advice was direct: “Consider making the human visible.”

That may be one of the most useful lessons for marketers working with AI. As content gets easier to produce, people will look harder for signs of human judgment, lived experience, accountability, and care.

Some of the Summit’s most urgent conversations focused on how brands should respond when narratives move quickly, especially when misinformation, bots, or inauthentic amplification distort the picture. Dan Brahmy, Co-founder and CEO of Cyabra, warned that AI is making manipulation easier, cheaper, and more accessible.

His advice was not to panic faster. It was to understand the situation better.

The brands that will win are not going to be the brands that necessarily respond the fastest, they’re going to be the brands that respond with clarity.

That may be the cleanest takeaway from Meltwater Summit on real-time consumer understanding. Speed helps, but speed without context can send a team running in the wrong direction. Data helps, but data without judgment can mislead. AI helps, but AI without human taste and accountability can make a brand feel flat.

The teams best placed to win will bring those pieces together. They will listen closely, validate what they hear, understand communities on their own terms, act with purpose, and respond with confidence.

Real-time consumer understanding means knowing which conversations deserve attention, why people care about them, and what your brand is genuinely equipped to do next.

What is real-time consumer understanding?

Real-time consumer understanding is the ability to monitor conversations, identify meaningful audience signals, understand the context behind them, and use those insights to make informed marketing and communications decisions while they're still relevant.

Why is social listening important for understanding consumers?

Social listening helps brands move beyond measuring mentions and sentiment. It uncovers recurring behaviors, cultural moments, audience motivations, and emerging opportunities that can shape campaigns, product decisions, and communications strategies.

AI is making it much faster to collect, organize, and summarize large volumes of information. At the Summit, speakers emphasized that AI works best when paired with human judgment, allowing teams to validate trends, interpret context, and decide which insights are worth acting on.

What was the biggest takeaway from Meltwater Summit 2026?

The Meltwater Blog

Chinese Sponsors at FIFA 2026: The First Two Weeks

Your Best Context is Already in the Room

What Meltwater Summit Taught Us About Understanding Consumers in Real Time

AI Search Visibility Report - June 2026: How Generative Search Changed This Month

What To Do If Your Brand Goes Viral: How To Keep The Momentum

FIFA World Cup 2026 Round of 32 Analysis: Upsets, Records & Knockout Heat

Beyond Sentiment: 10 New AI NLP Models That Unlock Deeper Intelligence

What we learned about PR measurement at Meltwater Summit

How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

How to integrate SEO and AEO into PR workflows: a strategic framework

On Demand Webinar: How Brands Can Capitalize on the Digital Buzz Around FIFA World Cup 2026

Social Media Metrics and KPIs: What to Measure in 2026