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 described the tournament as a “second launch” for the subscription streaming service that debuted last August. Fox One had to make sure its creativity punched above its weight to stand out among the countless brands looking to cash in on the event.

Enter the influencers.

Fox One partnered with Indeed to search for a “chief World Cup observer,” who would be paid $50,000 to watch each match 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 trademark “Viking Row” outside the cube garnered 1 million views on Instagram in the first 24 hours, and now surpasses 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 reaching out to 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. (Turns out it’s hard to get permission to fly a drone through Times Square.)

Fox One has also partnered with leading live streamer iShowSpeed, who streams select game videos to viewers with a Fox One subscription and posts other content while attending games and meeting players and fans.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the scale that YouTube has been able to drive for us,” Borkowski said. “That was completely unexpected.”

Riding the wave of the World Cup

Despite initial fears about whether the World Cup would capture American audiences more accustomed to “football” than “soccer,” this year’s tournament has generated huge television ratings and online buzz.

Social posts tagged #FIFA, #WorldCup or “World Cup” have generated more than $4 billion in earned media value (an estimate of how much attention they got organically without using paid advertising), according to CreatorIQ, an influencer marketing platform.

“You put the World Cup on anything and it seems to get likes,” Borkowski said.

Fox Sports, which broadcasts the World Cup on its linear television channels, has also unleashed a World Cup marketing campaign, featuring some of soccer’s biggest stars. Fox One’s approach has been to target cable cutters and never-users to get them to sign up for the platform. While the two branches of Fox have combined forces in some of their marketing efforts, Fox One has been reluctant to encourage more 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 “FIFA World Cup comes first”, feature humorous situations (such as snakes invading a children’s party and a driving lesson that goes horribly wrong) in which soccer fans are unaware of the disasters because they are distracted by the games.

Borkowski said that while many other World Cup ads show cheering fans 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.”

Maintain the influx of new subscribers.

Borkowski said the World Cup has already achieved “well above what we expected” in generating new subscribers and viewing time on Fox One, although he declined to share figures.

Ampere Analysis, which has access to a panel that monitors millions of Internet users in the United States, estimated that the start of the World Cup generated the second-largest day of registrations in the history of Fox One, behind only the start of the NFL season in September. Ampere estimated that 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 had the second-highest number of new signups across all streaming services in June, behind only Paramount+, which benefited from the White House’s UFC event, a Prime Day promotion and a migration of customers 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 digital agency Haus to improve its ratio of cost per acquisition to the lifetime value of each subscriber. Haus is also helping Fox One conduct match-market testing, a marketing method that helps brands determine whether a particular channel is working, typically by running a campaign in one geography while maintaining it in another and comparing the results.

Fox One is testing different trips and user onboarding offers, such as buy two months, get one month free, designed to keep people on the platform after the World Cup ends.

The biggest marketing lesson Borkowski took away from his World Cup experience?

Figuring out “how to stay agile” when something unexpected comes up and making sure the team was prepared to have the bandwidth (and some paid media reserve budget) to “add fuel to the fire,” he said.