by Sean Oliver
In our case, I’ve always said that content is king. Millenials will laugh at that old-timer’s credo, instead suggesting we should be trying to innovate some technology or distribution platform we could sell. But if you own the best shows out there, they will eventually play on every new platform that is to be created. You’ll be a part of every new media technology to come. They’ll all need you.
This market shift in content delivery is in no way making our programming less important. We are still the best shoot producers in the world and the litany of WWE-produced content only confirms that. Our honesty and grittiness can never be replicated by the shareholder-owned company. The challenge is in the pricing model, and unfortunately that’s a reality we’re attacking now.
But even after all this risk-aversion you’ve employed by staying out of a market-based business and being a slave to uncontrollable elements, you’ll still need to insulate yourself from being cast into oblivion. The market may not be the demon here, but rather it’s likely to be a competitor, technology, or a trend. Point is, if you have other revenue streams you’re not sunk altogether if a segment of your business becomes challenged. Stay ahead of the curve by consistently emphasizing innovation and you’ll always be firing your musket first, rather than being fired upon.
There’s an art to developing ancillary revenue streams without over-saturating your brand, which will do long-term damage. Here’s yet another instance where Businesses of Blood have a decided advantage over cold businesses. You’ll likely know instinctively whether or not your proposed product lines are consistent with your brand image, thereby being true brand extensions, rather than just more stuff. Your gut will tell you.
17. Know Your Market, Part II: Know It Like A Scientist
KNOWING YOUR MARKET as intimately as you know a loved one assumes a very emotional and passionate bond, and knee-jerk decisions about your Business of Blood will come from that place. But it’s also necessary to know your market from the cold place as well. It’s a little like performing surgery on that loved one. There must be a clinical side of you that can process market information and put informed decisions into action from there.
We all know bad business decisions are usually caused by a lack of the scientific insight. I can say personally, that there have been KC releases that were given a much longer road to profitability than needed. The reason for that was a lapse in market judgment. We know the market intimately and were personally excited about projects while we ignored that project’s likely sales. If you are running a lemonade stand and you’ve decided that you absolutely love tomatoes, therefore you will be adding tomato juice to your lemonade, you’d better be certain your customers will pay for tomato lemonade juice. This example seems silly, but in some cases that’s exactly what one may be tempted to do when possessed by, and therefore distracted by, personal tastes beyond what their market will accept.
You or someone in your company should have a good sense of what the market is for a particular venture. Since this is a Business of Blood that you’re intensely passionate about, you already know what would be interesting in your universe of buyers. But there’s a cost to the production of any product and you need to predict the approximate return you will get on the investment.
There are few ways to do this. Once you’ve been in business for a while, you’ll become familiar with the return of certain products and the expected return of similar products. Anthony and I communicate that way all the time when considering shows for production. I’ll get a call offering us Brodus Clay and I’ll reach out to Anthony.
“They want $5 for Monster BC,” I’ll ask. “Where do you think a YouShoot’s sales would land?”
“Not much more than Matt Sydal’s.”
In our Timelines, our 90s editions are the most popular across both WWE and WCW brands. The years of the ratings wars were hot, and those episodes do very well. If you can add a high profile guest like Eric Bischoff or Kevin Nash, it brings that episode to the next level. It’s 4-figure sales versus 5-figure sales, and knowing those baselines lets us make prudent decisions.
Though you may feel the market would like or need something, you may further discover that no one will pay for it in the numbers that justify its production. There’s a hard reality to business—if you’re not profitable, you’ll be gone. Don’t buy into the pervasive notion created by the Internet generation that everything should be free. You can definitely add value to your products and offer extras, and I would implore you to do so. But if your venture doesn’t make any money you can’t make more product. And you’re done.
Nothing is free, let’s get that out of the way. Any company that stays in existence is getting their money somehow. Yes, the download of that song may be only $1.29 or maybe even free if you illegally downloaded it from a file share service. But the premium will be built into the price of the concert ticket when you go see that artist. There is a reason a concert ticket starts at $99. You may think it’s wonderful that you can stream 200 movies a month for only $9.99, but when you do eventually go to a movie the tickets will soon be twice the price. Either that or you’ll be staring at advertisements for a fair portion of your time in the movie theater.
Successful media companies are getting adept at making up for the losses that digital piracy and devaluation are causing. You’re paying somewhere, either with money or time. Many people don’t realize this. Personally I’d rather go back to the time when I had to buy CDs for $15, but a concert ticket was $30. Or when there were no commercials in the movie theater, except for a few trailers. I don’t know about you but I’m sitting through more and more ads on the Internet now too. But this is where we are. And it’s your responsibility as a company owner to find ways to make up the losses that the digital revolution is creating. We are trying. But more on that in Part Four.
Perspective is important in considering this digital revolution. Though it does challenge content producers’ profits, it also gives us wonderful gifts that were previously impossible to obtain. The digital age has closed the chasm between product and customer, allowing for easy access—anytime, anyplace. Consider that there was a time where a company’s touch with the customer occurred only when the customer saw an ad, or saw the actual product on the shelf.
Today the Internet gives you a ton of potential points of contact with consumers. You have direct access to them via e-mail, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and they you. Many of the newer Businesses of Blood that exist today are made possible because of the digital revolution in the first place. Recording one’s own music and distributing it oneself would have been previously impossible, or at least very, very cost prohibitive. My mother can buy a USB microphone and start a podcast today. The opportunities created by the digital age need to be considered alongside the detriments of those advances and the devaluation of intellectual property. What giveth life also taketh away.
Back to scientific market knowledge. You need to develop that split personality—to be both a passionate participant in your market, yet still objectively assess the viability of a desire that exists in that market through cold calculation. As mentioned before, your gut will not help you here. This half of your total market knowledge comes from information and data, either intrinsically learned or researched.
In our specific market there is an expected range of sales for programs that deal with a particular era in pro wrestling. Old school, nostalgia programming, while fascinating and historically needed, appeals to a smaller market segment than does slightly more current era wrestling subject matter. Even the shift from a show that deals with 1985 to a show that deals with 1995 would likely mean a 20% increase in revenue right off the bat, regardless of the guest. That data runs counter to my own personal Blood, but that doesn’t matter much. The Attitude Era outsells the Hogan Era in shoots. And if the shows are salacious and controversial in nature, that means even more sales.
How did we get this market knowledge? Firstly, by selling plenty of both so we had information to study.
Then once we had the cold stuff to dig into, we did. Our marketing and budget decisions are based on both. A popular wrestler from the 70s and 80s may feel they should be paid X amount of money for a show because they are “worth that” and in their hearts, my heart, and the hearts of the fans, they may be worth that and even more. But the only thing that truly determines their worth is the return that their show will yield. Unfortunately their heart, my heart, and the fans’ hearts don’t know that value. But my head does, and it’s my duty to break off negotiations and move on if their financial expectations differ from the reality I know to be true.
Another tendency to avoid, which is caused by The Blood, is our errantly sticking with a project for too long despite mounting evidence that you should bail out. We always know when a project is in trouble, but sometimes we add confusion by having an unhealthy commitment to it. It’s no different from staying with an unfaithful lover after the point of no return, or working feverishly to save a precious, but sinking vessel. Your scientific market knowledge should overrule your passionate market knowledge and signal when it’s time to pull the plug.
Here are all the series we’ve had to cancel in our first 12 years:
1. Ringside. This was the first to bite the dust. We launched this in 2008 shortly after the success of Guest Booker and YouShoot, which were our first two out of the gate. The show was an attempt to capitalize on the mp3 audio commentary tracks we launched our company with, wherein a wrestling star walked you through their matches and feuds of note. The big problem here was that we couldn’t show the match footage, as we didn’t own any of it.
We built the set to resemble a ringside table from the 70s and 80s, complete with the boxy monitor and colorful, foam microphone covers. The guest sat beside me and watched the matches on the monitor that faced away from the camera, and we discussed what was going on, who the opponent was, the venue, and everything related to the match on the screen.
You see the problem there, right? A monitor facing away from the audience. It was flawed in concept.
We shot three editions with guests Vader, Demolition, and Terry Funk. All three had very interesting matches and feuds to discuss, but that wasn’t the issue. Maybe it was the host—me. After two releases we decided to hire journalist Bill Apter to take over the hosting and we renamed the show Bill Apter at Ringside. Well, it didn’t mater if we put Apter at Ringside or on Mars—sales stayed down.
2. My Side of the Story. I loved this one. We brought in two guys that had a famous feud and interviewed them separately, asking each the same questions, then brought them together at the end for a discussion about what each had talked about. We included a handbook with the first edition, outlining every detail about their feud you could ever want to know. We even had a comprehensive list of every match Greg Valentine and Tito Santana ever had with each other. It was brilliant and we did two editions—Tito and Greg, then Nikita Koloff and Magnum TA.
There were two problems here. Firstly it was double the cost of any other show because we needed two stars for each episode, including all their travel and associated costs. Scheduling was challenging too, as they often had separate obligations even while in the same town and we needed significant time to shoot each guy separately, then bring them together. We couldn’t book another show for that same day.
The other issue was the format. Fans had only seen linear discussions in shoot interviews. This was pretty cutty and it was all history and no road and rat stories. It appealed to that more narrow historian-fan, and coupled with the increased expenses it couldn’t make the money that justified its existence.
3. Missy Hyatt’s Pajama Party. Can you even call one edition of something a “series?”
4. Ring Roasts. This was less a series than recorded live events, but we still had to make the decision to pull the plug on the live aspect as well as the video releases. The first edition with The Iron Sheik was most consistent in concept because he was on the road doing comedy with a group called The Killers of Comedy from the Howard Stern Show. Plus, Sheiky was a shoot interview favorite. Sales were good but the expense of the massive live show created a large hurdle to clear. I could have had a higher profit margin by just sitting down with Sheiky alone.
Then for Ring Roasts 2 we brought in Terry Funk as the guest of honor—one of the most beloved men in the wrestling business. People got up and blew him instead of roasting him.
For Ring Roasts III we brought in the ringer—Jim Cornette. This would be the litmus test for the Ring Roasts concept. Everything that Jim touched in our catalogue turned to gold.
Except Ring Roasts III. Wrestling fans like comedy, and they like wrestling. They don’t like comedy about wrestling. Lesson learned, series cancelled.
5. Wrestling’s Most. Another one of my favorites goes belly-up. This was a countdown show that resembled the VH1 countdown shows that were pretty popular at the time, wherein a dozen or so wrestlers count down your votes for a wrestling topic, like Wrestling’s Most Controversial Moment or Wrestling’s Most Effective Heel. It was so much fun to shoot and edit, and hearing the stars comment on where the fans placed their votes was once again connecting fans directly to our programming.
I don’t know why it didn’t resonate with fans but the series couldn’t gain traction and we released like 8 of them. This is right when online posting and piracy began to swell and bite into our sales of shows, so unless your numbers were quite big and could mitigate the effects, your sales would be hurt.
6. Raven’s Restler Rescue. This was a reality makeover show wherein ECW star Raven would take a young, independent wrestler, rework their character, and then send them into the ring to see if the new gimmick would go over with fans. This was our attempt at the shoot interview 2.0. We were sensing the market was tiring of the traditional shoot due to time and an infestation of podcasts telling hours of stories for free.
Programming like Raven’s Restler Rescue, if it succeeded, could have lit the way for the next revolution, whereby stars of yesterday could again command decent fees. Shoot producers like us could begin crafting unique, reality programming with the stars, putting them in entertaining situations that spotlit their knowledge and charisma. If they were telling their road stories for free on a podcast, they could at least be paid to makeover a wrestler’s character on video. It would put emphasis back on production and differentiate itself from storytelling into a USB microphone.
Raven’s Restler Rescue didn’t get footing. As of its release, the shoot market had become so decimated that I’m not sure anything would have gotten footing. But we weren’t wrong for trying this. We identified the changing market and knew that shoot programming would need to change as well. Raven was great and the shows were funny. It was at this time we started to suspect that any ala carte programming wouldn’t fly in this new market where Netflix-style subscriptions are the norm. This might’ve been a great subscription network show, wherein each individual show doesn’t have to hold its own weight so much as become part of a great ensemble of shows. But we didn’t yet have our own subscription network, so RRR was put to bed.
7. Bombshells. This was always a tough one in my mind. We’d had a business relationship with a ladies wrestling organization so we had access to a talent pool of the finest in independent women’s wrestling. We didn’t have any programming that specifically and exclusively addressed that market segment, so there were signs that this show could do something. We found a great host in Leva Bates and booked some great guests for the first string of shows.
But there was something that was always troubling me—data. Some time before doing Bombshells, World Wrestling Network, our OnDemand vendor, sent me pie graphs of program hours streamed on WWN to justify yet a third increase in bandwidth charges to us. The illustration of their point illuminated something about ladies’ wrestling programming. WWN was showing us that KC was generating about 85% of the traffic on their network, with Evolve and ladies’ feds Shimmer and Shine accounting for the remaining 15%, and Evol
ve was the great majority of that. People just didn’t pay for indie women’s wrestling. That was more than confirmed with the butyrate of our Bombshells releases, and we put in overtime trying to pump up excitement for the series.
8. Gabe Sapolsky’s Next Evolution. This was an attempt to spotlight the contemporary independent stars before they headed for WWE’s NXT, for which Gabe’s Evolve fedeation was functioning as a feed in. We got the tip about who was getting called up, and we brought them in to do an edition of Next Evolution. It was a great concept and a system that really worked.
We had great talent for the first three shows in Rodereick Strong, Chris Hero, and Johnny Gargano, and they sat with Gabe and went over their best matches from Evolve. This time we could actually show the matches, unlike the ill-fated Ringside series. Gabe owned Evolve and granted us full rights to the matches, along with WWN, the distributor. We put a ton of advertising and press behind this launch. It never took off and saw the customary three editions before termination.
I really think that our last three cancelled series launches fell victim to that market shift away from per-program purchases. These three shows should have a place in the shoot programing landscape and I think some of these shows could find a home in our network system.
We produce 9 series that have survived the axe and are part of the ongoing programming plans for KC. That’s not a bad ratio for a production company. It’s all about finding the right idea and finding out if the data correlates to your vision.
Remember you do have a safety net, and that is The Blood. Your misses will never sink to drastic depths because The Blood has ensured your product will be somewhat engaging. The New Coke debacle of 1985 would never have happened if a truly passionate fan ran their company. Changing the taste of something so iconic and identifiable as Coca-Cola would have been unthinkable to a Coke mark. They may have considered a drastic rebranding or repackaging, but changing the taste would never have been on the table.
