Inside Fox Sports’s World Cup marketing blitz

The World Cup is well underway, but Fox Sports, which holds the English-language broadcast rights to the tournament in the US, isn’t done promoting it.

Does the biggest sporting event in the world even require a marketing campaign? Yes it does, according to Keri Gajewski, VP of brand marketing for Fox Sports.

“We’re not just targeting the soccer fans or the die-hards,” Gajewski told Marketing Brew. “We want all the sports fans to know, and now we want the entire country to know. It’s not just a sports event; it’s a cultural moment that we want everybody to be part of, and we have to sustain it for 39 days.”

Given the fragmentation of the sports media rights landscape, it’s no small task for the average person to figure out where and when to watch a game. That’s why Fox Sports is making a big deal out of promoting the World Cup, from a Miracle on Ice–themed ad to a stunt that involved hiring two “chief World Cup watchers” and sticking them in a glass cube in Times Square.

Do you believe in miracles?

Fox Sports started teasing the World Cup last summer and continued to beat that drum during other sporting events it broadcast throughout the year, like NFL games and Nascar and IndyCar races, Gajewski said.

In May, teasing turned into a full-fledged campaign, complete with an ad featuring the USMNT, Tom Brady, Swedish former striker Zlatan Ibrahimović, American soccer coach Bruce Arena, and Mike Eruzione, who captained the 1980 US men’s hockey team to Olympic gold in the game known as the Miracle on Ice. The spot closes on Eruzione saying, “What, you don’t believe in miracles?”

Showcasing the USMNT has been an integral part of Fox Sports’s marketing strategy, Gajewski said, with the goal of “getting Americans invested” in the idea that anything can happen in a knockout event like the World Cup, including a US victory. The USMNT has never won a World Cup, so expectations were relatively low heading into the tournament, but the team has notched two wins so far, clinching their group and advancing to the round of 32.

Fox Sports also homed in on former American player and current Fox Sports analyst Alexi Lalas, a controversial figure who’s received some criticism during the tournament. For one of Fox Sports’s IRL activations, the network sent five look-alikes called the “Lalas Bros” to events like the Boston Marathon and the Kentucky Derby.

“They’re designed to create conversation, social sharing, and the engagement that makes the tournament feel approachable for everyone…instead of just promo, promo, promo,” Gajewski said.

Stunt double

Fox Sports is showing some love to international soccer stars, too. Inflatables of Argentina’s Leo Messi and Spain’s Lamine Yamal, standing at 40 feet tall, have been popping up in various locations across the country (as well as one of “Captain America,” aka Christian Pulisic). They were meant to drive buzz for the tournament during the awareness phase of the campaign, Gajewski said.

The stunts are still alive and well, even with the tournament underway. One that’s still active involves a partnership with Indeed, in which Fox Sports hired two “chief World Cup watchers” to watch every match and create social content from inside a glass cube in Times Square. The original plan was to hire just one person, but after receiving about 6,000 applications within a couple of weeks, the Fox Sports team upped it to two, Gajewski told us.

“It’s socially shareable, it gets people talking in a different way, [and] it’s tapping into this creator group that maybe we wouldn’t authentically be able to tap into,” she said.

Talk about it

As is the case with any sporting event, not all conversation is bound to be positive. FIFA’s new “hydration breaks,” the three-minute pauses in the middle of each 45-minute half, have sparked heated debate among players, coaches, and fans. Fox Sports is caught up in the back-and-forth because it’s been running ads during the breaks, which The Hollywood Reporter estimated could be earning the network “at least $250 million.”Fox Sports declined to comment on the hydration breaks.

To understand whether its marketing push is doing the trick, the Fox Sports team is also using ratings from the programming itself as a KPI for the campaign, Gajewski said. As of June 18, the USMNT’s opening victory over Paraguay was the most-watched World Cup broadcast ever among English-language audiences in the US, totaling more than 18 million viewers on Fox, FS1, and Tubi, up 132% from their first game in 2022. On Telemundo and Peacock, the June 18 match between Mexico and South Korea now holds the record for most-watched Spanish-language soccer broadcast in history, with 14 million viewers, according to NBCU.

“We want to create that cultural moment, that FOMO in society, that if you’re not watching the World Cup this summer, then you are missing out,” Gajewski said.