Ennis' Take
ENNIS: Promotional Lessons For The UFC From a Completely Unqualified Source (Part Two)
Jul 29, 2011 - 11:45:45 AM ENNIS: Promotional Lessons For The UFC From a Completely Unqualified Source (Part Two)

DISCUSS ALL THIS IN OUR NEW MMATORCH FORUM

...OH, ONE MORE THING - PLEASE BOOKMARK US & VISIT DAILY!

By: Shawn Ennis, MMATorch Senior Columnist

Last week we talked about how it's important for fans – and by that I mean casual fans – to care about fighters and have some sort of rooting interest. This week I want to look at a couple of other aspects of promotion that the UFC is missing more often than not: ramifications and promoting the brand.

You would think ramifications are easy. Well, sometimes they are. Look at title fights, for example. If the champion wins, he retains. If he loses, the title goes to the opponent. Simple enough. But what about cards that don't have title fights? Why in the world should we care about a main event of Chris Leben vs. Mark Munoz? What's on the line here? What happens if Leben wins? What about Munoz? What happens for the loser? We have no real idea.

Sometimes the UFC tries to alleviate this problem by putting on title eliminator fights. But the problem is that we've seen too many of those fights turn into contests where the winner is "in the mix," rather than on the receiving end of an immediate title shot.

If you're not a student of the game (and sometimes even if you are), you have no idea what the possible ramifications are going into a fight card. There are no divisional rankings, there are no real number one contenders until title fights are signed – essentially no one knows where anyone really stands in a division, and no one really knows what each fight means until we're told afterward. That's not good enough.

It's not good enough to have to get online on Monday morning and find six or seven columns talking about the possible ramifications of the main event or semi-main event. We should know it going in. Ramifications are the glue that holds sports together. If wins and losses don't mean anything, then there's no reason to watch a fight. And if we don't know going in what the big fights mean, they don't mean anything. Putting on great fights is part of the equation, but by itself it is nowhere near enough. To demonstrate, look no further, once again, than UFC 132. If you knew anything going into that card, you knew it was an impressive lineup with a very good possibility of fireworks. But the card (according to reports) had a very pedestrian buyrate. Why? Because most people don't know what the hardcore fan knows, and the UFC did an awful job of informing them.

Take Carlos Condit vs. Dong Hyun Kim. If you follow MMA closely, you knew this was a fantastic fight waiting to happen. Sure enough, it delivered as Condit delivered a nasty knockout to the previously (technically) unbeaten Kim. But did you know what was in store for the winner of the fight going into the event? You may have thought that the winner would get the next title shot. That was certainly a possibility given the timeline and possible injuries coming out of the fight.

But did anyone really know what was on the line? Not really. As it turns out, Condit will end up fighting B.J. Penn at UFC 137. But if we look at that fight in the same manner, the same issue arises. This is a great fight on paper, and certainly an interesting one. But first off, relatively few people saw Condit's last fight. Most people probably don't know who he is. They do know who B.J. Penn is, and they probably know that he just fought to a draw with Jon Fitch. So again – what does this fight mean? Great fights don't exist in a vacuum. I can turn on HDNet and see an action-packed fight on any given Friday. But the UFC is popular because it's the major league. By definition, it means more on the whole. So why don't we know what individual fights mean going into the event?

There's another aspect of how the UFC promotes that is both helpful and hurtful. It's confusing, yes, but it's true. The UFC promotes brand over individual. This has been discussed at length in different forums, but that doesn't make it any less true.

A sport is never as big as its players or teams. I can hear commenters at this moment saying that no one cares about individuals in the NFL. That's true, but they care about teams. You could move every player to a different team right now and it wouldn't have much, if any, effect on the popularity of the league. But what if the teams weren't branded? If it was just team one vs. team two every week with no personality and no affiliations with different locales, the NFL would sink like a rock. Football itself doesn't sell only because it's the NFL. It sells because people love the Eagles, or the Colts, or whatever their favorite team is.

It's the same in the UFC. It's true that many people flipping through channels will stop on a fight and watch, and the action might hook them. But if those people never find particular fighters to latch onto and follow, you can say goodbye to them. The audience for "Order this UFC pay-per-view!" will never be as large as the one for "Order this Rampage vs. Rashad pay-per-view!" In the long run, the brand has a longer lifespan. But that's because of the fighters involved and because people care about them. It's not just the brand that legitimizes the fighters – that may work in the short run, but in the long run it's a two-way street. The fighters also have to legitimize the brand.

I'm not saying that the UFC shouldn't promote its brand. They absolutely should. What I am saying is that it shouldn't be at the expense of their fighters. The point is that the brand, though it should be known as an indicator of the importance of an event, should not be the main selling point. This is why you see UFC cards that tank on Spike TV (and Versus, though the fact that a card is on Versus in the first place doesn't help). If casual fans know the fighters, know that the fight is on and where to find it, and have a rooting interest, they will tune in for "Dan Hardy vs. Chris Lytle" a lot more readily than they'll tune in for "UFC on Versus 5."

This is also the reason that people think the UFC is over-saturating the market. They aren't. There's plenty of time to watch every card the UFC puts on. But when casual fans don't know the difference between cards other than to look at what number it is, they all just blend together. "Battle on the Bayou" isn't going to sell to nearly as many people as "Ellenberger vs. Shields." (Okay, maybe that's a bad example, but you get the point).

If you really want to see who can draw, especially on free TV, you've actually got to try and get the fighters "over" (or make them popular) with fans. The UFC does not get fighters over, and that's why they're not building new stars. When fighters are left to their own devices to get their names out there, you end up with an Anderson Silva situation. The fact that Silva didn't draw flies for his first three events as champion isn't his fault. It's the UFC's. And that's what happens when you promote brand over fighters.