$50K to Watch Every World Cup Game 👀

Happy Wednesday,

Fox One and Indeed paid two creators $50,000 each to sit in a glass box in the middle of Times Square and watch every single game of the FIFA World Cup. Six thousand people applied, but Kevin Akoto and Austin Franklin were the ones who got the job.

This week Jake and I sat down with both of them to talk about what the experience was actually like from the inside; how much creative freedom they had, what worked, what didn't, and what they think it actually does for their careers from here.

We also had a lot of thoughts of our own.

🎧 [Listen to the full episode]

When Fox paid $485 million for the exclusive English broadcasting rights to this year’s World Cup, they knew they were getting a good deal (industry experts estimate that the true value of this tournament was between $1b-$1.5b), but they had to be sure.

What if the tournament was a flop? What if the U.S. failed to win a single game? What if the American audience just wasn’t that into soccer?

To hedge against these risks and more, Fox worked to produce thousands of pieces of “shoulder” content to ensure that even if fans didn’t care about the product on the field, they’d still have something to watch.

And part of that “hedge” was putting two guys in a glass box in Times Square for 39 days.

Now, you might assume that a marketing stunt this grand would command a lot of attention, and I’d argue that it did (at first).

But here's what's interesting: Kevin and Austin's own accounts didn't grow as much as you'd expect from a campaign of this size. Two creators posting up to twelve to fifteen pieces of content per day for 39 days, backed by Fox One and Indeed, and the halo effect on their personal platforms was relatively modest.

Jake's read on why: the glass box itself was the limiting factor. Once you saw it once, you'd seen it. There was no escalating stakes, no reason to keep coming back, no novelty by day 9 (much less day 39). College GameDay works every week because the location changes, the guest roster changes, and the stories change, but the World Cup Box stayed the same.

My read on Fox's strategy: they were betting on the upside of the tournament itself, and that bet returned enormously. However, when the main product is that good, the shoulder content almost becomes irrelevant. This campaign wasn't designed to make Kevin and Austin famous; it was designed to add another, fan-first layer to Fox’s World Cup Coverage, and on that front, it worked.

The lesson for brands: when you're betting on a once-in-a-generation sporting event, throw everything at the wall, but remember: the goal of shoulder content isn’t to “convert,” it’s to pick up the small number of people that fall through the cracks. And at the end of the day, if the product on the field rocks, nobody will be asking about the performance of the shoulder content anyway.

1. A long leash is only as good as the creative instincts on the other end of it.
Fox and Indeed gave Kevin and Austin almost complete creative freedom; no five-page brand briefs, no approval chains, no restrictions on format. The word "broify" was used a lot internally.

However, that freedom is only valuable when the people holding it know how to use it. Austin's background in man-on-the-street content gave him an immediate playbook. Kevin leaned into capturing the fan experience. The blank canvas worked because they came with their own creative perspectives.

2. Times Square was the real star.
Austin said it best: every country that had a match in New York congregated to Times Square for a meetup. The box could have been anywhere, but the fact that it was Times Square, the cultural center of the most diverse city in the world, during the most global sporting event of all time, is what made the in-person activation genuinely irreplaceable. The setting was as much logistics as it was storytelling.

3. Trial and error on live content is faster than any strategy session.
Austin tried saying "Zlatan" ten thousand times during a match just to see what happened. Fox One themselves came up with a bit where they paid Kevin and Austin an extra $1,000 to stay completely silent through a USA game while American Outlaw supporters watched with them. Some things worked, others didn't, but the ones that worked got leaned into.

Like everything on social these days, the feedback loop was immediate. In live content, your audience tells you what to make next (if you're paying attention).

4. The headline is not the budget.
Kevin and Austin's $100,000 combined fee was almost certainly the smallest line item in this entire campaign. The glass box alone was probably $100,000 in fabrication and AV. A Times Square placement comes with licensing fees, city permits, and taxes on top of that. Then there's the paid media behind the campaign. The headline “we paid two guys $50K to watch the World Cup” was brilliant precisely because it obscured how much the whole thing actually cost.

(That’s not criticism btw, hats off to Fox and Indeed for pulling that off).

5. A big opportunity is a starting line, not a finish line.
Jake's biggest concern after the conversation: Kevin and Austin are going to have a lot of money grabs presented to them in the next twelve to eighteen months that are tied primarily to this campaign. That's great in the short term; however, the risk is becoming reliant on the halo of one activation instead of building the foundation underneath it.

The real test of a creator isn't what happens when you're in a glass box in Times Square during the biggest sporting event in the world; it’s what happens on a random Tuesday in February when nobody's watching.

A lot of times, creators and brands operate from a scarcity mindset. There is only X dollars in the marketing budget, so we have to focus on Y and cut Z.

But what happens when you’re responsible for promoting the most popular sporting event in world history?

I’d argue you do what Fox just did and spend whatever it takes to create as much additional content around the event as possible (studio shows, YouTube series, creator partnerships, etc.), and not just because it can help drive subscribers to your streaming service, but as a way of casting the widest net possible.

To be honest, heading into my conversation with Austin and Kevin, I thought I was going to grill them on why some of their content didn’t perform better. But the more time I spent with them and this campaign, the more I realized social media content performance wasn’t really the point.

Austin and Kevin were there to represent an audience that Fox wanted to make sure it didn’t let slip through the cracks. If this tournament went the way it did, it was always going to be a financial windfall for the network, and no amount of content from two guys in a glass box was going to change that.

Instead, this was a creative way to make sure that Fox had a fan-first content engine, a PR hook, a Times Square activation, and a creator partnership all rolled into one.

And by that metric, this campaign was a smashing success.

🎧 [Listen to the full episode]

📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.

See you then,
Tyler & Jake