Profile / Media & Streaming
He built subscriber machines at Hulu and FanDuel before the streaming wars got loud. Now he has to convince America to pay Fox directly.
Every few years, a big media company decides it is done letting the middleman own the customer. The cable operator, the box office, the bundle - all of it a wall between the brand and the person paying. Someone has to knock down that wall and market the relationship on the other side. At Fox Corporation, that someone is Brian Borkowski.
In 2025 Fox named him Chief Marketing Officer, DTC - direct-to-consumer. It is a title that did not really exist at legacy TV companies a decade ago, and it carries a specific weight now: get people to pay Fox, or watch Fox, without a cable bill hiding the price. His remit runs across the company's consumer-facing portfolio, from the ad-supported streamer Tubi to FOX One, the subscription service Fox rolled out to sell its news, sports and entertainment directly to viewers.
It is the kind of job you can only really do if you have spent years learning why people hit the subscribe button. Borkowski has. His resume reads like a walking tour of the streaming era.
Long before every studio had an app, Borkowski was inside Hulu working the least glamorous and most important corner of the business: getting new subscribers and keeping the media spend efficient. He rose to Vice President of Media and Acquisition and led subscriber acquisition during a stretch when streaming was still a bet, not a certainty. Acquisition marketing is a discipline of small percentages - a better landing page here, a smarter media mix there - that compound into millions of members. It is where he learned the trade.
In 2021 Borkowski left streaming for something louder. FanDuel hired him as Senior Vice President, Marketing, right as legal sports betting was spreading state by state across the United States. He took charge of media, customer acquisition and lifecycle marketing - the full funnel of turning a curious sports fan into a repeat bettor.
Streaming taught him how to acquire. Sports betting taught him how to make people act now.
FanDuel's marketing chief at the time put the logic plainly. "Brian's success in highly competitive environments, sophisticated media strategies, and attracting customers through world-class promotions, partnerships, and propositions will be invaluable as we move forward," said Mike Raffensperger, then FanDuel's CMO. The betting world runs on urgency - every Sunday is a deadline - and that pressure is a different school than the patient math of streaming acquisition. He took both lessons with him.
In 2024, three of the biggest names in American media - Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery - tried to pool their sports rights into a single streaming app called Venu Sports. It was an audacious idea, and it needed a marketing leader who could make a brand from scratch under a very bright spotlight. Borkowski was named Chief Marketing Officer. More than 150 executives and engineers worked on the launch.
Then it stopped. Legal challenges shut Venu Sports down before it ever signed up a single subscriber. For most executives, a venture that dies pre-launch is an awkward line on the resume. In media, it is closer to a graduate seminar. You still do the pricing work. You still build the positioning. You still write the go-to-market plan and stress-test it against real competitors. Borkowski walked away with a full launch playbook he never got to run.
Which brings him back into the Fox orbit. Fox is not a scrappy app trying to be noticed - it is one of the most-watched collections of brands in American media, spanning Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment, the local Fox Television Stations, and Tubi. The company reports annual revenue in the billions and employs thousands. Marketing that as a direct subscription is a different problem than marketing a startup. The name is already famous. What is new is the ask: pay us directly.
The cable era rewarded companies that hid the bill. The streaming era rewards the ones brave enough to send it.
FOX One is the sharp end of that strategy - a subscription service that streams Fox's biggest live draws, from sports to news, without a traditional pay-TV package. Tubi sits on the other side of the barbell as a free, ad-supported service pulling in broad audiences. Marketing both at once means speaking to a viewer who wants to pay for nothing and a viewer who will pay for the right thing, sometimes the same person on the same night. That balance is the assignment.
Read his career quickly and it looks like job-hopping. Read it slowly and it looks like a thesis. Hulu, when streaming was a question mark. FanDuel, when betting went legal and direct. Venu Sports, when giants tried to build a direct sports app together. Fox, as it launches FOX One. He keeps showing up at the exact moment a company decides to own its customer relationship instead of renting it.
That is a bet on a single idea: the layers between a company and its audience are collapsing, and someone has to market whatever comes next. Fifteen years in, the trend he wagered on is still accelerating - and Fox just made him responsible for a very large piece of it.
There is no grand mission statement attached to any of this, no manifesto. Just a marketer who understood early that the future of media would be sold one subscriber at a time, and who kept moving toward the companies willing to try it. The next chapter is the loudest one yet, and it plays out on the home screen of anyone deciding whether Fox is worth a monthly line item.