As Pulse Glazer recently critiqued the changes to ROH in Pearce’s first two shows, I thought I’d look at what needs to change. Not what I want to see, not new characters, but what really impacts ROH as a small company.
This is not a bitch column. With a possible blow-off to Danielson/McGuinness this weekend and both Aries Vs. Marufuji and Danielson Vs. Morishima in December, the new administration is at least providing the most exciting possible match-ups. And we haven’t yet seen the Pearce era’s shows on DVD to judge them firsthand. I’m writing about simple business. It’s a topic I normally avoid because consumer advocates and fans should be concerned with the entertainment-side, not the business-side, and if you prefer the latter you ought to trade your Wrestling Observer subscription for the Wall Street Journal.
That hypocritical leap made, what was wrong with ROH? Sadly, most of it is still going on.
For the vast majority of people who ever heard about it, the way to take in a show is to put down $26 and wait for the DVD to arrive. They can’t see it by channel surfing, and seven-minute matches on youtube don’t give an inkling of what the company could promise. And if an outsider does go through ROH’s website and likes what he sees, to actually follow all of ROH’s shows on DVD means shelling out over $800 a year.
It also means waiting between one and three months for a show to even become available. Rising Above was taped in December of 2007. It aired in March of 2008. Sure, it featured one of the best singles matches the company has ever done between Austin Aries and Nigel McGuinness, but by the time consumers could pay for it the buzz had died down considerably. It aired in the middle of Wrestlemania season, when anyone who read anything about ROH had three months of storylines to reinforce not only who won, but that the company had moved on.
This wasn’t a unique thing. The ROH diehards, myself included, are still paying for old news. We not only knew Kevin Steen loses to Nigel McGuinness at Injustice, but we knew he lost the next two re-matches before the first was even available for sale. It is a model that absolutely hurts interest, and will only hurt it more as the global recession tightens personal budgets.
Survivor Series is this weekend, one of WWE’s biggest shows of the year. Imagine how many people would buy it if just this one show were taped two months ago.
It’s a crumby business model that only turned profitable because of a stellar product, and ROH can’t fix it. It is entrenched in how they work, and their fans overlook it. We overlook a lot. The company ought to be very grateful to these fans, not just for their loyalty, but for their word of mouth, which has done more to publicize the company than all the people running it. Word of mouth can make a very popular indy band. But to have more than fun in clubs takes more.
Running a commercial on Raw in the city you’ll be visiting the week before you visit is pretty poor advertising. I stuck up for the company when it moved to Pay Per View – at fifteen bucks for two hours they deliver a superior in-ring show for the dollar than WWE or TNA on a fairly consistent basis. I shrugged off that this was a grand venture that had to bring in many new fans. This was a low-cost gamble that could help a little, and would be very cool for the existing fanbase. If they were serious about this being a leap they would be advertising the crap out of it, or at least do many more interviews (and ones with sites more reputable than those frequently linking to Bit Torrent clouds). This deal, where they didn’t even know the date of their next PPV when they aired the current one and thus couldn’t even advertise from show to show, could only mean so much.
Recently, though, it’s been reported that they wanted the moon. It’s sad if it’s true. Anyone in Ring of Honor who thought the move to PPV on its own was adequate for a sales jump was either incompetent or grossly ignorant. Grassroots movements are great –I recommended these shows to many people. Norine Stice has a glowing review of the latest PPV offering, and as someone who was there live, let me say that if you love in-ring action, it’s worth the $15. Critics don’t influence movie or videogames sales that much, and they can only do so much for wrestling. I didn’t see one television commercial or one banner ad anywhere but ROH’s own site leading up to Respect is Earned – or Respect is Earned 2, a year later.
Movie stars go on talk shows. Bands hit the radio. Meanwhile, you couldn’t even rely on an ROH star to talk up a show on Figure 4 Daily or In Your Head the week before a PPV. Check my claim for yourself. Driven 2008 debuted last Friday. Where was the commercial or promotional drive from ROH?
Why not fix this? Common sense says it’s because advertising costs money. In fact, a lot of the immutable problems with ROH growing beyond its current level are grounded in finances. Maybe the backers didn’t have the money or the faith. Of all the possible investments, an indy wrestling company isn’t an appealing one. But anyone who turns around blaming the booking is ignoring the obvious.
WWE has an incomparable marketing engine. Even TNA is so bad at creating new stars that going on seven years they’ve got a storyline about titans from elsewhere bagging on the “nobodies†from this company. There is a silly criticism that ROH should shoot to be like WWE, even though that “entertainment†company has something the pocket books of a hundred Cary Silkins couldn’t equal.
WWE puts together world-class hype videos multiple times a week. They attract such talented media people that just one jumping to TNA noticeably improved their video packages. WWE can introduce and push anyone they want – the lumbering and largely talentless Great Khali, a goofy midget sidekick like Hornswaggle, a beefcake whose offense revolves around a hold that wasn’t even viable in the days of the AWA like Chris Masters, or a pudgy flippy guy like Super Crazy. They can take the worst brawling and turn it into beat-synched drama (and they did just that throughout the Khali/Cena feud last year).
Meanwhile, Ring of Honor typically puts together music videos that would flunk a student in a college editing course. I have no earthly idea why they have not tapped fans from sites like www.theMVzone.com to put together a few thirty-second hype videos using public domain music. There are sites full of talented and passionate people who would do it for free, because they already do.
It can be even simpler than music videos. In addition to not getting the word out like a big company, ROH does not look like a big company. They aren’t going to HD on PPV or BluRay on DVD any time soon. But even before TNA and WWE were in high-definition, it was obvious that ROH was a budget promotion. Their best shows had substantially weaker lighting and camera work. Even to wrestling’s most hardcore fans, ROH’s presentation was severely inferior to Japanese promotions like Dragon Gate and Pro Wrestling NOAH, from which they borrowed talent. It’s no surprise that ROH took the opportunity for Samurai TV to produce their Tokyo Differ shows this year.
It can be more complex than music videos, too. WWE’s ability to cross-promote and expose wrestlers is astounding. For all the good feelings ROH’s staff may have at being tied to The Wrestler, WWE can generate ten times the interest by sending Big Show to Conan O’Brien. The way things are today, the only way Brent Albright is going to get on a late night talk show is to jump ship.
Even the dumbest things WWE does help keep the world aware of them. It’s bigger than the annual Smackdown Vs. Raw videogame that other companies pay to advertise for them. A profitless John Cena movie can still raise his profile. Those action figures that never sell remain a constant commercial in toy aisles. Even the old WWF Monday Night Raw t-shirt someone wears is a miniature billboard. Once a national audience knows of a brand, every minor reference to it just keeps reminding people. It is a whole universe away from where ROH stands, and building in that direction will take a lot more money than everyone involved probably has.
ROH’s big changes in marketing so far have been an increase in youtube videos and putting a street team thread on their message board. The latest release includes backstage hype promos that could have come right out of the AWA. The changes are fine little moves that could stimulate a little more interest in the company. They will not change their world.
And things that would change their world? A major production and distribution deal? A weekly television show? They would provide so many potential changes and challenges that they require their own columns, and have been the topic of many already around the internet.
The same internet that gave ROH its buzz provides a problem they can’t do anything about: Bit Torrent and other piracy mediums. Anything you sell on DVD can be stolen within days of its release. If three hundred people download one show, ROH loses $6,000. If those same three hundred people download all the forty-odd shows for a year, ROH loses out on $240,000. That’s a quarter of a million dollars from a company that isn’t even profitable every month.
And the major problem with this model? It’s way more than three hundred people pirating them.
While I write in total ignorance and some cynicism, I simply don’t believe the common line that pirates are just sampling a show and will buy it if it they like it. Some will, most won’t, and that’s part of why companies with sales so slim it’s hard for them to stay open, like Chikara, are surprisingly well-known across the internet.
Some people probably had a knee-jerk reaction to my phrase a few paragraphs ago, “ROH does not look like a big company.†Some were doubtless ready to jump on me and defend the wrestlers. But what’s wrong with the presentation has very little to do with them. If it did, WWE, TNA and NOAH wouldn’t constantly court people from this company.
Yes, the average ROH wrestler is small. So was the average WCW cruiserweight wrestler, and they got a lot of attention. There is a market for athletic wrestling between smaller competitors who are excellent at it. I point you to the amazing crowd reactions Rey Mysterio Jr. Vs. Evan Bourne got on Raw a few weeks ago, compared to the lackluster reactions Rey Jr. got against Kane. If CM Punk and Brian Kendrick can become popular in WWE, then all wrestler-specific issues are manageable. As loath as I am to bring up boxing and cage-fighting, these events draw primarily for sub-heavyweight fighters. Heck, Floyd Mayweather Jr. is such a huge star (at 5’7â€) that WWE brought him in for Wrestlemania.
And trust me, El Generico masks could sell.
To tell that locker room that anything they were doing was the main reason ROH wasn’t exploding financially would not only be a lie, but an insult. This is not about chinlocks and head drops. More psychology is always welcome, but psychology already means a great deal to this company – evidenced by Bryan Danielson being more popular than any flyer in company history. No, ROH has basic production value issues, barely advertises and has minimal exposure outside of the hardcore wrestling fan set. Asking fans to tell their friends was not going to take them to the next level.
There’s another issue that was supposedly holding ROH back that we must address, and it splits into two erroneous sentiments. These have been floating around since the firing of Gabe Sapolsky.
The first is that his booking was broken and he had to go for the company to grow.
The second is that his product was flawless.
ROH’s writing under Mr. Sapolsky’s tenure had issues. Sometimes it came from outside limitations, like booking issues with NOAH that held up the blow-off to Danielson/Morishima for an entire year. That story was essentially paused from December of 2007 to December of 2008. It will not have nearly the hype it could have if it had been executed timely.
Other times the problems came from within. As I wrote at length months ago, Claudio Castagnoli was built terribly for his leap to the main event. Their atrocious handling of Erick Stevens essentially turned an entire circuit of audiences against him. Gimmick matches have been damaged as the ends of feuds by their appearance on almost every show. They even indulged in man-on-woman violence, albeit much less frequently than TNA was when it got blasted for the habit.
The difference between it and the big leagues? For what they were able to do they appeared to have far fewer flaws, and so often produced the things in the ring their audience loved that flaws were often overlooked. It’s a simple feature in human life: we will overlook shortcomings for those we come to love, be they in a spouse, a novel, or an indy wrestling promotion.
That effect was partially the genius of ROH’s direction: write storylines that set up a bunch of matches, keep things flowing, always have a pressing issue, and get the heck out of the wrestlers’ way.
It was also partially the necessity of their business model: you can’t have a bunch of throwaway endings and intelligence-insulting stories when the fans are paying by the episode.
Lastly, it was partially the result of their size: they were an indy with a small budget, so you reasonably had to lower expectations for production. Some people didn’t and simply turned away, but those who love it may read these paragraphs and not even recognize what I’m writing about, as they’re so used to overlooking it. I know I overlook these things all the time, as they aren’t that important to me. They are not so negligible to getting a bigger audience.
Wrestling critics familiar with ratings patterns, including Bryan Alvarez of the Figure 4 newsletter, frequently claimed ROH would crush TNA if given the same television deal and financial support. Maybe half of the Wrestling Observer’s readership actually follows Ring of Honor, yet when it was not contested by MMA they routinely voted it promotion of the year, voted some of its matches to the best of the year, and granted Gabe Sapolsky “Booker of the Year†multiple times. Especially as Ring of Honor doesn’t appear to be doing much new advertising, their continued reliance on word of mouth was as well-served by Sapolsky’s approach as one could hope, at least in regards to wrestling newsletter response.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially strangers. The rumors of TV-style booking, more rest holds and generic offense are troubling, but they remain largely as rumors. Yet if anyone in that company thinks a run-in during the World Title match was the change ROH needed to make the jump, many more people than Mr. Sapolsky need to be shown the door.
That’s it for this week. Come back Friday for Pulse Glazer’s preview of Adam Pearce’s second weekend as booker, with the highly anticipated Danielson/McGuinness Pay Per View taping. For now, you could always visit my site of monologues, micro-fiction and list-fiction: www.johnwiswell.blogspot.com
