MMA Takes The Big Stage To Try And Grow Audience and Interest…

November 7, 2009 by Joe Favorito · Leave a Comment 

The World Series is now over, the NBA and NHL seasons have begun their long stretches, college football is missing a compelling weekend matchup, the luster of the NYC Marathon is gone and the NFL is passing its midpoint. So into the mix when there is a lack of marquis events this weekend falls the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, which returns to CBS in primetime still looking for a challenger to provide any mainstream competition to the UFC. Can either capture the casual fan on a slow weekend? The CBS/Strikeforce show will feature perhaps MMA’s largest and most enigmatic star, Russian Fedor Emelianenko in a heavyweight bout at the Sears Center in Chicago. With nowhere near the mainstream hype that Kimbo Slice had during CBS’ earlier MMA test with Pro Elite, and without female star Gina Carano on the card, Emelianenko will have to carry the card and try to find a way to endear himself to a public and to marketers that appear to be even more agnostic to MMA as a whole than they have been in some time. Make no mistake about it, the UFC continues to be the number one experiential brand in the sport and maybe in all of fight sports, but the strides to add new partners and even build mainstream names other than the MMA vets that have grown in the past few years, continues to hold MMA back from jumping to a level of growing mainstream acceptance. Saturday night could be another chance to provide that move forward, even with a promotion in Strikeforce that is a great regional event but has not caught national acceptance with the casual fan.

The UFC Experience Picks Its Spots To Build Brand

February 4, 2009 by Joe Favorito · Leave a Comment 

Even with the down economy, Super Bowl weekend continues to be the biggest weekend in Las Vegas. More fans flock to the desert to bet and enjoy the atmosphere than go to the site of the game, and the group that has capitalized on that Super Bowl weekend experience more than anyone is the UFC. Say what you want about MMA, the experience remains akin in brand to what the WWE is to their fans and to what Daytona is to NASCAR, and as much as the mainstream media try to downplay it, the core audience remains strong while the casual fan will still watch. The latest convert was the LA Times Kurt Streeter, who attended not even a UFC fight, but the recent Affliction event in Anaheim, and was blown away by the crowd and the power of Russian heavyweight Fedor Emelianko . Even if the Affliction/Fedor fight was not UFC, it was still good brand awareness for the sport, and as George Willis pointed out in the New York Post Friday, the UFC event in Vegas between George St. Pierre and BJ Penn was perfectly timed, well orchastrated and fed into the weekend in Vegas seemlessly. Will MMA ever replace a great boxing match or move further into the mainstream worldwide? My guess is no. But second tier sports can learn a great lesson from the UFC. They have cultivated their core audience very well and speak directly to it wherever they go. That keeps the mainstays sated and gives the casual fan enough interest to attend and drive numbers to a very solid place. The fly in the UFC’s ointment? A Bloomberg report last week that Station Casinos is near default. If true, then the UFC might have to spend less to push the fringes of its brand and not expand as quickly to questionable markets without a large cash flow. Still the times when Zuffa needed the Station money to stay afloat are past. At the end of the day it is still the UFC experience which is the only durable brand in the sport that consistently delivers a demo and revenue, and by conquering Super Bowl weekend in Vegas, the UFC brand will stay solid with their core in tough times.

Life’s A Beach…AVP Maximizes East Coast Opportunity

July 21, 2008 by Joe Favorito · Leave a Comment 

The success of the AVP Crocs Tour in Southern California is well documented…a year round lifestyle sport with some of the greatest athletes on the planet.  However taking that brand and making it a national one is always a challenge, but the beach volleyballers took the past few weeks to build brand equity and market share in a very crowded weekend by maximizing every opportunity while making a rare Northeast Stop…on the sands of Coney Island in Brooklyn.  The tour used their athletes, their brand partnerships and CEO Leonard Armato in a multi-week strategy leading up to the event, garnering features on the sport’s business in Brandweek, wsj.com, the New York Post, Forbes.com and Bloomberg TV and radio, while also using their partnerships with brands like Cuervo and Banana Boat to expose the athletes to some key television time away from the event.  Pull in some lifestyle pieces with the New York Times, the New York Daily News and others, and the result was a well run experiental bonanza for the brand and the sport, at a criticial time leading into the Olympics with partner NBC.  Well hit, great placements.