Fox One’s World Cup marketing playbook is all about letting the creators do the scoring.
The World Cup is a high-stakes moment for Fox One, which has described the tournament as like a “second launch” for the subscription-streaming service that debuted last August. Fox One had to ensure its creative punched above its weight to stand out among the myriad brands looking to cash in on the event.
Enter the influencers.
Fox One partnered with Indeed to search for a “Chief World Cup Watcher,” who would be paid $50,000 to watch every game from inside a viewing cube located in New York’s Times Square. They ended up employing two — Austin Franklin and Kevin Akoto — who have consistently drawn crowds and added online reach for the brand. A video of Norwegian fans performing their signature “Viking row” outside the cube drew 1 million views on Instagram in the first 24 hours, and is now up to more than 15 million, Fox said.
“We feel like we’ve landed on a gold mine,” Brian Borkowski, CMO of Fox’s direct-to-consumer business, told CMO Insider.
He added that Fox One had been fielding outreach from sports leagues, talent agencies, and advertisers looking to get in on the action, including one company that floated the idea of delivering a package to the cube via drone. (It turns out it’s tricky to get permission to fly a drone through Times Square.)
Fox One also partnered with top livestreamer iShowSpeed, who is streaming watchalongs for select games for viewers with a Fox One subscription and posting other content as he attends games and meets players and fans.
“We’ve been very pleasantly surprised to see the scale YouTube’s been able to drive for us,” Borkowski said. “That was completely unexpected.”
Riding the World Cup wave
Despite early jitters about whether the World Cup would capture American audiences more accustomed to “football” than “soccer,” this year’s tournament has driven huge TV ratings and online buzz.
Social posts tagged #FIFA, #WorldCup, or “World Cup” have driven more than $4 billion in earned media value — a calculation of how much attention they gained organically without needing to use paid advertising — according to CreatorIQ, an influencer marketing platform.
“You put the World Cup in anything, and it just seems to get likes,” Borkowski said.
Fox Sports, which is airing the World Cup on its linear TV channels, has also unleashed a World Cup marketing blitz, featuring some of soccer’s biggest stars. Fox One’s approach has been to target cord-cutters and cord-nevers to get them to sign up for the platform. While the two Fox arms have combined forces on some of their marketing efforts, Fox One hasn’t wanted to encourage further cord-cutting by running ads on linear TV and has instead focused its paid ads on connected TV, social media, and out-of-home placements.
The video ads, which carry the tagline “The FIFA World Cup Comes First,” feature humorous situations — like snakes invading a kid’s party and a driving lesson going horribly wrong — in which soccer fans are oblivious to the disasters because they’re distracted by the games.
Borkowski said that while many other World Cup ads feature fans cheering and “a lot of face paint,” Fox One deliberately took a different approach to stand out.
“I’m a big believer in humor in marketing,” Borkowski said. “If you can make someone laugh, that’s the best way to get them to remember you.”
Maintaining the influx of new subscribers
Borkowski said the World Cup has already achieved “well above what we expected” in driving new subscribers and watch time on Fox One, though declined to share numbers.
Ampere Analysis, which has access to a panel that monitors millions of US internet users, estimated that the start of the World Cup drove the second-largest day of sign-ups in Fox One’s history, behind only the start of the NFL season in September. Ampere estimated the company added nearly twice as many new customers in June as in any previous month of operation, and more than 1 million new subscribers in the first week of the World Cup alone. Overall, Fox One drove the second-highest number of new sign-ups across all streaming services in June, behind only Paramount+, which benefited from the White House UFC event, a Prime Day promotion, and a customer migration from BET+, Ampere said.
Borkowski is aware that the heavy lifting will need to continue once the World Cup concludes on July 19 to sustain the influx of new subscribers.
Fox One has been working with the digital agency Haus to improve its cost-per-acquisition ratio relative to each subscriber’s lifetime value. Haus is also helping Fox One conduct matched-market testing, a marketing method that helps brands determine whether a particular channel is working, usually by running a campaign in one geography while holding out in another and comparing the results.
Fox One is testing different user onboarding journeys and offers — such as buy two months, get one month free — designed to keep people on the platform after the World Cup ends.
Borkowski’s biggest marketing takeaway from his World Cup experience?
Figuring out “how to remain nimble” when something unexpectedly pops off, and making sure the team was set up to have the bandwidth — and some reserve paid media budget — to “pour fuel on the fire,” he said.
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