Fox One’s World Cup marketing strategy has delivered what the streaming service’s chief marketing officer describes as a gold mine, with creator-led campaigns driving more than 1 million new subscribers in the first week of the tournament alone, according to estimates from Ampere Analysis.
The results matter because the World Cup is, in effect, a second commercial launch for Fox One, which only opened to subscribers on 21 August 2025, priced at $19.99 per month or $199.99 annually, according to the Fox One launch press release. Generating meaningful subscriber volume before word of mouth takes hold is essential for any service that young.
From a Times Square Cube to 15 Million Views
The centrepiece of Fox One’s World Cup marketing has been its ‘Chief World Cup Watcher’ partnership with Indeed. The job posting sought one person to watch every game from inside a viewing cube in Times Square; Fox ended up hiring two, Austin Franklin and Kevin Akoto, who have drawn street crowds as well as online audiences.
A video of Norwegian fans performing their ‘Viking row’ outside the cube pulled 1 million views on Instagram within the first 24 hours and has since climbed 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 Business Insider’s CMO Insider newsletter.
Fox One also partnered with top livestreamer iShowSpeed, who streams watchalongs for select games to Fox One subscribers and posts content from matches and player meetings. The YouTube traction that followed caught the team off-guard. ‘We’ve been very pleasantly surprised to see the scale YouTube’s been able to drive for us,’ Borkowski said. ‘That was completely unexpected.’
The creator activity sits within a broader commercial wave. Social posts tagged #FIFA, #WorldCup, or ‘World Cup’ have generated more than $4 billion in earned media value, a measure of organic attention equivalent to paid advertising, according to influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ. ‘You put the World Cup in anything, and it just seems to get likes,’ Borkowski said.
Fox One’s World Cup Marketing Goes Beyond the Cube
On the paid side, Fox One has deliberately avoided linear TV to prevent cannibalising Fox Sports’ existing cable audience, instead concentrating spend on connected TV, social media, and out-of-home placements. The video ads carry the tagline ‘The FIFA World Cup Comes First’ and lean on humour: scenarios include snakes gate-crashing a children’s party and a driving lesson descending into chaos, with fans blissfully unaware because they are watching football.
Borkowski is a self-declared advocate for comedy in advertising. ‘If you can make someone laugh, that’s the best way to get them to remember you,’ he said. The approach was intentional: he observed that many rival World Cup ads featured fans cheering and ‘a lot of face paint’ and wanted Fox One to stand apart.
The paid subscriber results have come in ‘well above what we expected,’ Borkowski said, though he declined to share figures. Ampere Analysis, which monitors a panel of millions of US internet users, estimated that the World Cup opening drove the second-largest day of sign-ups in Fox One’s history, behind only the start of the NFL season in September. Ampere also estimated that Fox One added nearly twice as many new customers in June as in any previous month, and ranked second across all streaming services for new sign-ups in June, behind only Paramount+, which benefited from a White House UFC event, a Prime Day promotion, and a migration of BET+ customers.
Those numbers sit in a market where the commercial stakes are enormous. Ampere Analysis estimates that sponsorship revenues around the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup will reach $2.4 billion, while media rights revenues will hit at least $3.8 billion, up 22% from the 2022 tournament, for a combined total exceeding $6 billion.
Fox One was built to compete for audiences who have already cut the cable cord or never had it. The service, overseen by Pete Distad, a former Apple executive who had previously led the collapsed Venu Sports joint venture, bundles Fox News Channel, Fox Sports, the FOX Network, Fox Business, FS1, FS2, and several other channels, according to the Deadline report on the service’s launch. Fox Corp. first announced its streaming plans in May 2025, positioning them as a response to declining linear TV viewership.
Retaining the subscribers acquired during the tournament is now Borkowski’s principal challenge. Fox One is working with digital agency Haus on matched-market testing, running campaigns in select geographies to isolate which channels are actually driving conversions. The team is also trialling different onboarding offers, including buy-two-months-get-one-free deals, designed to extend subscriber relationships beyond the final on 19 July.
Borkowski’s broader lesson from the campaign: stay nimble when something unexpectedly catches fire, and keep reserve paid media budget available to ‘pour fuel on the fire.’ How much of that subscriber base sticks around once the last whistle blows will be the real measure of whether Fox One’s World Cup marketing has done its job.