ESPN signed a contract with the WWE last week, in which many of his live events are organized at the Disney sports giants, but John Cena immediately gets into the ring.
CENA plays a new and crucial role for ESPN and plays as a trainer for people who want to learn about new functions who start their new Direct to Consumer service on August 21. A teaser with CENA and ESPN's first advertisement masking mascot “App-E” debuts that deal with the new experiences on Monday.
“We would like to make sure that more people have a wide awareness,” says Jo Fox, ESPN, Senior Vice President for Marketing, in an interview. CENA will portray a “sports trainer”, she says, who informs potential customers that they have a new way to get “all ESPN in one place”.
The Disney Sports Hub enters a crowded field. August 21stst Start the company to arouse interest in its offer just a few weeks before the start of the next NFL season. However, there are many other streaming services with sports, including a new Fox One app that is intended on the same day as ESPNs. In the meantime, the main video services of NBCU from Peacock and Amazon also rely on sport as their business card for consumers.
The new service is considered critical of the assets of ESPN and its owners Disney and Hearst, who deal with an exodus of subscribers from traditional cable to questions. ESPN and ESPN2, each with 61.4 million subscribers at the end of 2025, are expected to drop to 57.9 million or 57.8 million by the end of 2026, according to Kagan's data, a research unit from S&P Global Market Intelligence. ESPN would like to receive a broad group of around 60 million consumers who do not subscribe to traditional TV packages in order to take into account the new ESPN streaming event location -and also display new interactive and personalized functions for conventional ESPN viewers that can use their current subscription to access the mobile app of ESPN.
The company will provide the teaser in the linear properties of Disney as well as on social media and online videos, says Fox. In the coming weeks, Cena will probably talk about live ESPN events, new functions and even how the new ESPN service can receive as part of a larger bundle of Disney's online video properties. This is a reason for the use of traditional TV networks for the advertisement, although new subscribers are likely to come from the ranks of the cable cutters. Nevertheless, there are many veterans -SPN lovers who learn about new functions with whom they can spend more time with sports sales.
The trainer character “really helps because they hold the hands of the fans and explain them to them in a way that is entertaining and committed,” says Fox. The concept is not “the easiest thing that you insert into a few symbols and some words”.
Cenas looks even more response than expected. In addition to a unique pact with the National Football League, which gives ESPN the opportunity to distribute NFL Network and NFL Redzone, the company also presented a five-year law contract with WWE, which organizes premium live events such as “Wrestlemania” for the new streaming service. The introduction of Cena was “Kismet,” says Fox, who refused to say whether the upcoming pact influenced the choice of talent in the new campaign.
The anthropomorphic “App-E” could also surprise ESPN impairments, says Fox, who finds that ESPN has never had its own advertising mascot, even though it has carried out many unmistakable campaigns over the years. “We all had the same reaction,” she says when she learned that ESPN has never been dependent on such a marketing technique. The longevity of the new character probably depends on its ability to win the current game of the media – and generate streaming subscribers.