Revisionist History: CBS Didn't Kill EliteXC
by Michael Rome on Oct 8, 2009 3:29 PM EDT
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the promotional value the TV networks bring may be the MOST IMPORTANT factor in a promotion's success. this is true whether we're talking UFC & SpikeTV, Strikeforce & CBS/Sho, and the WEC & VS.
when i was the marketing manager at EliteXC it always troubled me that CBS (aside from the event that followed March Madness) did a bare minumum job of promoting the brand & events. EliteXC's leadership was mostly to blame for its failure, but CBS also contributed by failing to actively promote the brand. and now it kinda looks like they're giving Strikeforce the same red-headed stepchild treatment. its not enough just to broadcast the live event...it has to be heavily promoted to the viewers first, especially with the UFC's monopoly standing in the sport. and 2-3 week out promos just dont cut it...Fedor v Rogers was announced a while ago, so there's been ample time to kickstart the campaign to make it a huge success.
SpikeTV promotes the UFC at every break. CBS cant do the same volume, but - aside from a regular promo schedule - there should at least be more of a concerted effort to cross promote, especially with CBS' sports, late night talk, and morning news programs. there's also available program inventory on the weekends that could be used for a countdown show. and there's also a complete lack of any viral campaign, which is inexcusable given the nature of the fanbase.
The most important factors in a promotion's success are actually revenue generation and the ability to put on fights that the general public wants to see. EliteXC failed spectacularly on both fronts, which is why the company no longer exists. Many former EliteXC employees remain bitter at CBS for pulling out of plans to buy them out, so it's no surprise to see CBS getting the blame just under a year after the company collapsed.
No amount of promotion by CBS could change the math that doomed EliteXC. They were losing millions of dollars with no meaningful avenue to generate revenue. Better ratings wouldn't change the fact that you can't lose tens of millions of dollars in an economy where nobody is lending and hope to survive.
CBS actually did a very good job promoting EliteXC. They helped make Kimbo Slice and Gina Carano national stars, and contributed to media onslaughts before the first and third EliteXC shows that far surpassed what the UFC gets on a regular basis. What did the people at EliteXC expect? They signed a horrible deal just to get on CBS, and then claimed to be shocked when the same broadcast network that signed them to a joke of a deal didn't treat them like CSI. It's CBS's fault that EliteXC's talent pool was so shallow that they had to headline their second network show with Robbie Lawler vs. Scott Smith?
It's way too early to evaluate CBS's promotion of Strikeforce. Fight promotion involves convincing fans that they want to see two people fight, and the problem for Strikeforce is most people don't know Fedor. And no ad campaign is going to make much of a difference; the only way to really make him a star is to get him on national TV and let him do his thing. The odds are against him being a huge ratings star, but his apologists are already lining up to blame any potential ratings failure on CBS.
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What about the show in Stockton? As you said the fights on that card were hardly compeling but CBS could have done a little bit more promoting with that card. Jake shield and Nick Diaz could have been bigger stars if CBS and Elite XC had marketed the event a little better.
This is not how fight promotion works. You can’t convince people to care about fights they don’t just by running endless ads. How many millions should they have spent to move the rating from a 1.9 to a 2.1?
How many adds did CBS run for the Stockton show? 10 at the most maybe? If they cared about MMA at all they would spend a couple of bucks. But as you said in your post below they wanted to sign MMA cheap. If they really wanted to promote MMA on CBS they would have pushed Elite XC a litte more but it is obvious that the executives at CBS see MMA as a fad and treated the product as a fad
This is something you hear from people in marketing all the time “It failed because you didn’t give us enough money”. According to marketing people, things never fail because of a shitty product. Also, its never there fault.
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by Kid Nate on Oct 8, 2009 5:11 PM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
Maybe you can refresh my memory because it’s been a long time… but what exactly did CBS do for Carano and Kimbo other than highlight them on the cards? Kimbo was popular from Youtube and Gina was popular due to her beauty, stint on AG, and the fact that she’s a hot chick fighting MMA.
I don’t recall CBS doing a whole lot, to be perfectly honest, but I can’t really remember that far back.
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They did huge ad campaigns for Kimbo during March Madness, got Gina onto E:60 and the Craig Ferguson show, and did all kinds of media for them.
How do you sign a deal that pays you less than half a million per show, but then expect CBS to spend 5 times that on ads? I mean, it’s common sense. All of this was utterly obvious at the time they signed a horrible deal, CBS signed on to MMA on the cheap, why the hell would they then spend a ton to market it?
Okay, that refreshed my memory a bit.
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by Leland Roling on Oct 8, 2009 3:18 PM EDT up reply actions
Gina
She was on about every radio show in the country before that. In New York she was on WFANs morning show Craig Carton and Boomer Esiason (sp?). Which is oh owned by CBS.
They have had Dana White on in the past, I think, but clearly they helped.
Not airing spots on NFL sundays…those are worth a lot of money.,
Thank You...
Some common sense around here. People are quick to jump the gun when CBS succeeded in making Gina and Kimbo household names. CBS did a good job promoting EliteXC’s stars, but no matter what they did, EltieXC was doomed due to their debt and business plan.
Kimbo and Gina are responsible for about 75% of their own success … the rest would be marketing.
EliteXC was HORRIBLE at creating stars
"I’m not going to stop yelling because that would mean, I lost the fight!"-Kenny Powers
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by ekc on Oct 8, 2009 5:02 PM EDT up reply actions
Good Write Up Rome...
Exactly what I was thinking when he wrote that in the UG. I made some similar comments to him as well.
Cindy O is a shill, but why would you LOL at Patrick being called a wise man?
He’s was a big part of the success of ICON sport and put a lot of effort into building up guys who Strikeforce is cashing in on now (Robbie Lawler, Mayhem Miller). He’s done one hell of a lot more for the sport than your cut & pasting ass has done.
LOL
I know Patrick, and think he is a great guy and has done a lot for the sport, but I didn’t agree completely with his analysis there. This was no disrespect to him. A better question is why are YOU so upset over this?
Because I was a big fan of ICON and don’t like watching run down a guy who was an integral part of their success just because he disagreed with your agenda.
I don’t agree with his analysis either, but that doesn’t mean I feel the need to mock the man.
Good job mocking someone who has the stones to be known as a real person Mister anonymous internet guy.
What have you done lately to help people?
A man should never waste an opportunity to keep his mouth shut.
While I agree CBS’s marketing of Elite XC didn’t cause the downfall, don’t rewrite history and say they didn’t kill EXC. CBS demanded that Elite XC put their biggest stars on every show. With their stars on CBS it was impossible to go to PPV which was the plan to create revenue. I am not saying it would have worked but as you said Kimbo and Gina were household names.
Also don’t forget both Kimbo and Gina had a significant amount of publicity going into the CBS deal. Kimbo was the YouTube legend and Gina was beautiful and landed a spot on American Gladiators. Marketing is easy for fighters like that. What CBS needed to do was help market the other stars like Diaz, Lawler, Shields, and Alvarez. Don’t tell me marketing can’t make fans want to see a fight. Look at Anderson Silva vs Thales Leites, the TUF coaches fights, Serra vs GSP, etc…all were bouts created by marketing that did good buys.
Finally let’s not rewrite history ourselves. CBS directly killed EXC when they demanded Kimbo fight on their last show even though his opponent was injured. They said they wouldn’t air any of it unless Kimbo was on the card. Enter Seth Petruzeli and the end of EXC.
Ok.
CBS demanded that Elite XC put their biggest stars on every show. With their stars on CBS it was impossible to go to PPV which was the plan to create revenue. I am not saying it would have worked but as you said Kimbo and Gina were household names.
This is not killing EXC, this is trying to make a run at being profitable. Stars get ratings and CBS wanted ratings. EXC’s mistake was thinking they could do CBS with stars and do PPV, but they didn’t have the depth to do it and completely failed or did not attempt to build any stars.
Now Gina and Kimbo needed no hype, but it was in no way in CBS’s best interest to market Diaz, Lawler, or Shields. They were still early on in the whole MMA thing and needed eyeballs to prove the concept to the higher ups. I don’t think they could get money to build new names.
Finally let’s not rewrite history ourselves. CBS directly killed EXC when they demanded Kimbo fight on their last show even though his opponent was injured. They said they wouldn’t air any of it unless Kimbo was on the card. Enter Seth Petruzeli and the end of EXC.
This is plain wrong. CBS might have said Kimbo or no show, but not on the day of the show. Shamrock got cut that evening and pulled out. Money was already invested and they would not have yanked the whole show. And like eck said below, they were already going under. Even signing the CBS deal was a last ditch effort to save the company and come back from cash flow issues. They bought up too meny small orgs and had awful management who routinely made decisions that I questioned. Turns out I was right.
and Elite gets no blame for telling CBS they will give them all of their big stars?
And Rome isn’t saying that marketing won’t create buys, he’s saying that there is only so much that CBS could have done for them.
The TUF coaches fights aren’t big shows because of commercials, they’re big shows because of TUF. UFC does great buys because they are constantly marketing, not just commercials and one show at a time. TUF has 2 purposes, marketing a coaches fight (not happening this time, but generally TUF does) and marketing a finale. During the show they show ads for the upcoming shows. Dana is constantly doing radio/twitter/vlogs/whatever to tell people what is going on. They are getting fighters out doing interviews and doing whatever else they’re doing. That’s all marketing. Not all of that is done by Spike, Zuffa does a lot on their own, Elite needed to do some also.
One the best things Zuffa has going is that every time they have a show it is a commercial for the next show. Strikeforce hardly ever knows when or where the next show will be when they put on a card.
Don’t get me wrong, CBS could have done more, but Elite put themselves in a position where they needed/expected CBS to do more than they would, and they have no one to blame but themselves for that.
Honestly, I pretty much agree with everything you said. I think we are just looking at this from opposite sides of the same coin.
I didn’t mean to say EXC had no blame in their downfall and if it came acroos that way it was unintentional. Their website costs, purchasing up smaller promotions, and monsterous debt were all their own doing. But at the same time the CBS deal prevented them from doing anything to survive and CBS did next to nothing to help.
Seth Petruzeli DID NOT kill EliteXC… about 50 other things before that did…. not one of those was Kimbo or fighter salaries.
"I’m not going to stop yelling because that would mean, I lost the fight!"-Kenny Powers
shooter/cutter for AllElbows.com
by ekc on Oct 8, 2009 4:59 PM EDT up reply actions
I disagree. While there are many things that contributed to the downfall of EXC, it was Seth Petruzeli who put the final nail in the coffin.
EXC’s monsterous debt and their inability to hold a PPV because CBS demanded their biggest stars were huge. But when Seth, an unknown, smaller opponent stepped in the ring and dropped the face of the organization with a jab in such a short time it crippled a lot of hopes. And then he went on radio and hinted he was paid to keep it standing, it did in fact kill EXC. CBS backed out on the idea of buying them, Showtime (owned by CBS) demanded repayment of a loan that they knew EXC couldn’t afford, there was no hope Kimbo could headline a PPV, etc. While the debt was destroying the company gradually, Seth killed it with one jab and a few words on radio.
EliteXC agreed to sign that deal with CBS. It’s not fair to blame CBS for signing a deal that was good for it.
And frankly, CBS is under no obligation to bail out EliteXC, a promotion which staked its success on a fighter who was more style than substance. Refusing to rescue EliteXC isn’t the same as killing it.
Ultimately it was the responsibility of EliteXC and the Shaw’s to create marketable stars and make sound business decisions. You can’t blame CBS, Showtime, or anyone else for the poor decision making of EliteXC’s officials.
Many former EliteXC employees remain bitter at CBS for pulling out of plans to buy them out, so it’s no surprise to see CBS getting the blame just under a year after the company collapsed.
IIRC, Patrick was long gone before the whole CBS buyout fiasco occurred, so it is not fair to paint him with that particular brush. He was among the first round of guys who left the company when Gary Shaw handed the booking duties over to $kala rather than qualified guys like T Jay Thompson or Terry Trebilcock. Freitas is a Superbrawl / ICON guy who got pulled over in the buyout, so obviously he was appalled when Thompson (his mentor) & Trebilcock got got marginalized within the company. If he had an axe to grind it was with EliteXC management, not CBS.
I think he was just offering a relatively unbiased insiders opinion, or at least as unbiased as an insider of capable of being.
skala had nothing to do with that video… it was showtime using MMA to push its boxing.
"I’m not going to stop yelling because that would mean, I lost the fight!"-Kenny Powers
shooter/cutter for AllElbows.com
by ekc on Oct 8, 2009 5:00 PM EDT up reply actions
elitexc was done BEFORE the last CBS show…. about 75% of the ProElite staff was laid off a week or two before that show even happened and almost no proelite staff was even flown out to the event, that normally went to every other event.
"I’m not going to stop yelling because that would mean, I lost the fight!"-Kenny Powers
shooter/cutter for AllElbows.com
LOL @ Kimbo's MILF hunter tee
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by theworldsoldestsport on Oct 9, 2009 3:49 PM EDT reply actions
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