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By Shirley Brady
The wrestling event of the year is hitting New York's Madison Square Garden this weekend-and it should be a smackdown for pay-per-view revenue.
World Wrestling Entertainment has spent $5 million on traditional and guerrilla media (such as graffiti murals, street teams and pizza boxes) in the last few months alone to promote WrestleMania XX, the biggest PPV event in the company's history.
The company is billing the event as "Where it all begins…again," a promise to its fans and affiliates alike that the buzz is back for WWE.
"The buzz is definitely coming back," says Kurt Schneider, WWE's EVP of marketing, who has spearheaded the yearlong campaign to build momentum for WMXX. "This consumer push has marked the first time in WWE history that we've galvanized the company around one tent-pole event. And once we get more people in with WrestleMania, we've got to keep them there."
The event's multimillion dollar consumer and branding push puts WMXX ads in consumers' faces in its strongest U.S. pay-per-view markets, rather than blowing the budget on a single Super Bowl ad. "This is our Super Bowl," Schneider says of the marquee event, which will also air live in 90 countries. "When tickets went on sale on the Internet back in September, with no card because we hadn't announced who was going to be on, we sold out in a minute and a half. Three minutes later on eBay, our highest tickets [$750] were already selling for $6,500. And there were already 23 bids."
With consumer buzz building across all its properties, including its TV brands Raw on UPN and SmackDown! on Spike TV, Schneider started gearing up an affiliate push. "I don't know if it's familiarity breeds contempt or they just had too many other things going on, but cable operators were not giving us as much attention as they used to. We weren't as hot as we were a couple of years ago, so we haven't been making them as much money-pay-per-view is a dwindling part of their business, and they're much more focused on SVOD, VOD, broadband, telephony. Also, we're there every single month, and it becomes, 'Oh, it's those wrestling guys again.'"
So they met with cable operators to reintroduce the brand, and added two events (for 14 PPVs this year) to drive more buys.
"Over the past 20 years we've provided over $1.7 billion to the cable industry, but now we have to focus on what we can do for them going forward," says Schneider. "Our road show from November through January went to about 50 different systems, where we sat down and explained everything we're doing to promote PPV buys, and bounced around some ideas of how to work more closely with them. We talked up our affiliate extranet site and we sent out special marketing kits, making everything as turnkey as possible. The message was, 'We want to make money, and you can make more money from us, too, so let's help each other.' We're not a one-off event, we're not a concert or boxing-we're there every single month for you and we're bringing a huge audience, and it's only going to grow with everything we've got going on. So treat us differently and you will get the returns."
Many of the conversations with operators, Schneider says, were also about what else is coming down the road. That area falls to Thomas Barecca, who joined WWE (from AMC) as SVP of WWE Enterprises to oversee new content platforms and brand extensions. Analysts and shareholders would love to see a WWE-branded subscription product for digital cable and/or broadband. There are also rumors of a WWE-branded TV channel aimed at late-night viewers, but Schneider says any such talk is premature. "Like everyone else, we're looking at VOD, SVOD," he says. "There are no firm plans yet, but we're seriously talking about all the possibilities."
One of the challenges facing WWE as it looks at ways to monetize its library of programming is that its court-mandated rebranding from WWF means that all logos and images of the old logo must be scrubbed from its archives-a hugely expensive inconvenience that puts a kink in any future use of its archives.
Included in those archives is the first WrestleMania, which hit the Garden on March 31, 1985, when Hulk Hogan and Mr. T defeated "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff before a sold-out live and closed-circuit audience that generated 63,000 PPV buys. WWE has grown into a global brand that is not only a huge moneymaker-a recent event in Dublin, Ireland, sold out in six minutes-but has made household names of talent such as The Rock and Hulk Hogan.
But seeing that talent make it big in Hollywood means it has to work harder to keep generating new stars to keep fans happy and attract new members to the WWE club, which will also drive revenue for its shareholders and partners.
Enter WrestleMania XX. See you at the Garden (or on PPV) this weekend.
Are you testing, launching, expanding or just plain creatively marketing VOD, HSD, HDTV, DVR, ITV, VoIP or any other cable acronym? Drop a line to .
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