Walk into a Norwegian supermarket this summer and the national team is for sale. Antonio Nusa smiles off a cucumber wrapper. Martin Ødegaard fronts the salmon. Erling Braut Haaland is on the bread, the milk, and — if you know where to look — a bag of carrots. Yoghurt tubs, smoothie bottles, crisp packets: barely a product in the store has escaped a landslag face. Norway is at its first men’s World Cup since 1998, and the shelves have caught the fever.
Most of it is exactly what it looks like: a famous face slapped on an ordinary product to make it move. One Norwegian marketing academic compared the players to the lead singer of a band — the bit that makes you notice the record. Fair enough. But one brand is playing the same game with far more discipline than the rest, and it’s worth slowing down to see how.
The long game dressed as lunch
Bama — the fruit-and-veg giant that supplies most of those grocery shelves — has spent years building Haaland into the face of Norwegian vegetables. The vehicle is the Norsk-kampanje, a long-running partnership between Bama, Gartnerhallen and the Nyt Norge label aimed at one unglamorous goal: getting Norwegians to eat more in-season Norwegian produce.
The 2026 edition adds two new faces alongside Haaland: cross-country skiing superstar Johannes Høsflot Klæbo and chef Christian André Pettersen. It’s made by agency Anorak, with Hallvar Witzø of Tangrystan directing and a creative team of Christoffer Rontén and Tone Jansson. And here’s where it gets interesting: instead of the usual athlete-in-a-studio setup, the campaign films follow the actual working day at a Gartnerhallen farm — harvesting, packing, logistics — with Haaland and Klæbo mucking in alongside the producers. Bama’s marketing director Jon Eivind Fornes described the two as guys who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, saying the idea was to show the people behind the produce in a warm and humorous way.
That plainness is the point. It reads as real people in a real supply chain, not a campaign — and that keeps the tone from tipping into the athlete-worship that every other Norwegian product is currently doing.
A government prize for selling carrots
Here’s the part that should make any strategist sit up. In January, the 2025 edition of the Norsk-kampanje won the Norwegian Health Ministry’s prize for “healthier marketing,” beating entries from MatPrat and Tine. A vegetable distributor turned its advertising into a public-health good and got the state to hand it a trophy. The jury praised the campaign’s high visibility — noting that many consumers had actually tried a vegetable after seeing the ad — and the energetic pairing of role models with raw ingredients.
Meanwhile, grocery chain Kiwi runs its own World Cup push with Bama on exactly this logic — pairing football joy with healthier products to nudge children toward better choices. That is an extraordinarily strong position to argue from. Who’s going to attack the carrot ad?
Ambush by wholesomeness
Step back and the strategy is a kind of ambush marketing — but inverted. Bama isn’t an official 2026 World Cup sponsor. It bought no official rights, no tournament logo, no stadium boards. It simply lets the national-team fever do the work and quietly redirects all that attention away from merchandise and toward fresh produce. Where rivals rent a player’s fame to shift one more multipack, Bama is renting it to build a years-long behaviour-change story it can keep winning awards for.
Bama’s marketing manager Carina Rebtun Andresen made a telling point about the balance: the celebrities bring attention, relevance and credibility, she said, but they’re meant to support the story, not overshadow it. The campaign is fundamentally about Norwegian value creation and the people behind the produce. That’s a discipline most brands lose the second they book a superstar.
The Budweiser problem
Which brings us to the interesting wrinkle. This year, Haaland has a contradiction to manage. In April he signed on as global ambassador for Budweiser’s “Let It Pour” World Cup campaign — running in forty countries, though not in Norway, where alcohol advertising is banned. The reaction at home was sharp. A public-health body called it cynical health-washing; a leading sponsorship analyst said it clashed with the wholesome image Haaland has spent years building, and added, pointedly, that Klæbo would never have done it.
So what does Bama do? It brings in Klæbo. The one athlete the critics held up as the incorruptible counter-example becomes the co-face of Bama’s cleanest, healthiest campaign — at the precise moment its other star is fronting beer. Whether that was the conscious plan or a lucky bit of timing, the effect is the same: the brand tops up its purity reserves exactly when its lead ambassador is spending them elsewhere.
What’s actually being sold
It’s tempting to file this under “nice, wholesome food advertising” and move on. I’d resist that. What Bama is quietly demonstrating is that an athlete’s wholesomeness has become a tradable asset — something a brand can lean on, deplete, hedge, and top up like any other line on a balance sheet. Haaland can be a beer ambassador in forty countries and a vegetable evangelist at home, and the contradiction is managed, not resolved. That is a more sophisticated thing than a cucumber wrapper — and a more cynical one, too.
The strongest World Cup marketing in Norway this summer may well belong to the brand that never bought a ticket to the tournament. No logo, no rights, no stadium boards — just the country’s two cleanest-living athletes, a bag of carrots, and a government prize to wave at anyone who objects. The rest of the shelf is selling the World Cup. Bama is selling the halo around it — and it’s the only thing on the shelf that won’t be out of date come August.
Bama’s flagship World Cup-summer film — the 140-year anniversary epic, stuffed with Norwegian sports icons (Haaland and Klæbo included) and built to air in the breaks of Norway’s matches:
For the long lineage — Bama has put footballers next to fruit since the Gamst Pedersen / Hangeland / Carew era:
