Home Depot Hired Beckham. Who Would Have Been Better?
A three-step answer, starting with what went wrong.
Second Opinion is a regular series from Savvier, the AI platform for marketing teams. Each week we take something live in culture, run it through Savvier workflows,
and share what might have been better.
01
The Situation
Home Depot hired David Beckham for the 2026 World Cup. So did 10 other brands: Adidas, Bank of America, EA Sports, Lay’s, Lenovo, McDonald’s, Ninja Kitchen, Pepsi, Stella Artois, and Verizon. Beckham showed up in almost every commercial break. The Drum called him the World Cup’s most overused marketing asset.
Home Depot’s version was called Beckham’s Backyard. The reasoning came straight from the press release: Beckham loves gardening and entertaining. Those are hobbies. Home Depot’s brand is built on projects.
02
The Breakdown
So who should Home Depot have hired instead? We ran that question through Savvier. Savvier has 50+ workflows designed by leading marketing experts. Each one is like a recipe for a specific marketing task. We ran three: one to figure out what went wrong, one to find a better partner, one to write the ad that might have been better for the brand.
Strategic Feedback
Output → The Diagnosis
Strategic Feedback checks a piece of marketing work against the brand’s foundation and returns what needs to change. Ideally you run it before you sign the deal. If Home Depot had, this is what they would have seen. Here Savvier’s strategist agent provides their thoughts, in their own words.
Brand Personality Expression
Take“Home Depot’s personality is the practical, knowledgeable, encouraging expert who champions doers. The Beckham campaign puts a celebrity guest in a backyard and treats the store as a supporting cast member. That reverses the personality.”
Reco“Recast the hero. If Beckham stays, put him in an apron in a store, learning something from a real Pro. If he goes, put real doers in the hero slot.”
Competitive Differentiation
Take“Ten other brands hired Beckham for the same tournament. Category exclusivity locked out direct competitors, but did nothing to differentiate Home Depot from the other ten Beckham-fronted campaigns.”
Reco“Make the spot un-swappable. If the logo at the end were swapped for any other Beckham advertiser, the ad should collapse.”
“Swap the logo at the end for any of the other ten Beckham advertisers and the spot still works. That’s the diagnosis.”
Overall Assessment · Strategic Feedback
Audience Engagement
Take“Home Depot’s core audience is the doer. The Beckham creative gives that audience nothing to engage with. There is no how-to hook, no aspirational-but-doable project, no store visit reason.”
Reco“Put a real doer at the center of the story. Someone building something for their family will always land harder than a celebrity standing in a garden.”
Brand Partnership & Influencer Strategy
Output → The Pick
Brand Partnership & Influencer Strategy looks at your brand and your project and recommends influencers, creators, and brands to team up with. So who would have been a better fit than Beckham?
“The World Cup happens in stadiums for 30,000 people. It happens in backyards for three billion. The people watching don’t need a hero. They need the setup, and they need it to work.”
Key Insight · Brand Partnership Workflow
The Message
Home Depot makes the backyard where the world watches.
Influencer Pick
Ryan Reynolds
Canadian actor, producer, and marketer. Co-owner of Wrexham AFC. Runs Maximum Effort, the production company behind Aviation Gin (sold to Diageo for $610M) and Mint Mobile (sold to T-Mobile for $1.35B). Arguably the most successful brand-marketer of the last decade.
Why Them
Reynolds’ Maximum Effort playbook centers real product truth wrapped in self-aware wit. That is Home Depot’s voice with a comedy license. His Wrexham ownership gives him earned soccer credibility Beckham cannot beat, and his Canadian nationality gives him a real stake in one of the three co-host countries.
The Collaboration
A three-spot broadcast campaign called Ryan Reynolds Practices. Reynolds is comically bad at DIY. He tries to build a backyard for a World Cup viewing party (bar, patio TV wall, string lights) and fails at every step. Real Home Depot Pros from real Los Angeles stores keep quietly saving him on camera. He hosts the party. They built it. Directed by Maximum Effort, cast from Home Depot’s LA district.
What Gets Shared
Any moment where Reynolds looks at the camera deadpan and describes his own incompetence, then a Pro walks him through the actual fix in ten seconds flat.
What Makes It Land
The Pros are real employees from named stores. Not actors. Celebrity as customer, Pro as hero. That’s Home Depot’s brand truth on camera.
Video Script Development
Output → The Ad
Video Script Development writes 10 different types of scripts, from explainers to testimonials to brand films. Savvier’s very first prototype was built to write scripts, so this workflow is particularly good at it. For Home Depot, we ran the Conceptual/Brand type, which produces three scripts on different angles. This is the one we liked best. Included is a high-level storyboard produced alongside the scripts.
“Some people want to be the guy who screams at the TV. I want to be the guy whose TV everyone’s screaming at.”
Opening VO · “The Host”
:30 · Revised TV Spot
“The Host”
| Video | Audio |
|---|---|
|
0:00 – 0:04 OPEN ON RYAN REYNOLDS. Seated on a folding chair in a bare suburban backyard, coffee in hand. Golden morning light. Slow push in. |
VO (RYAN) “Some people want to be the guy who screams at the TV. I want to be the guy whose TV everyone’s screaming at.” |
|
0:04 – 0:08 CUT TO Ryan pushing an orange Home Depot cart across a store parking lot at golden hour. Cart loaded with patio TV, string lights, folding table. |
MUSIC Warm acoustic strum, builds. SFX |
|
0:08 – 0:12 CUT TO Ryan hanging string lights. They droop. He tries again. Sun setting behind him. |
RYAN (softly, to himself) “It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.” |
|
0:12 – 0:18 CUT TO Home Depot store aisle. LOUISA, mid-30s, orange apron, holds up a wind-rated bracket for Ryan. Warm store lighting. |
LOUISA “Wind-rated. Run the line before you fix the anchor points.” SUPER |
|
0:18 – 0:25 MATCH DAY EVENING. Wide shot: transformed backyard. String lights up. Wall-mounted TV showing the match. Grill running. Friends arriving with dishes. A goal is scored. Backyard erupts. |
MUSIC Warm swell. SFX |
|
0:25 – 0:28 CLOSE ON Ryan’s face at the edge of the party. Behind him, a friend leaps to his feet screaming at the TV. Ryan just watches, quietly beaming. |
FRIEND (background shout) “YESSS!” RYAN (murmurs) |
|
0:28 – 0:30 END CARD. Clean orange lockup on off-white cream. |
SFX Clink of a glass. SUPER |
End of Script
03
The Takeaway
Test
A spokesperson alone isn’t a strategy. If the ad still works when you swap the celebrity, the celebrity is the point. If it doesn’t, the brand is.
Discipline
Famous doesn’t mean fit. That’s a judgment call that still takes taste and experience. Savvier helps you make it, but doesn’t make it for you.
This is just a small example of what Savvier can do.
See what it can do for your team.