Hello and welcome to My Pinterest Is Piledrivers, I am your host James A. Carter and I am also Jack’s Existential Crisis. And with that reference to the modern classic of film and fiction, we’re off…
Advertising is everywhere. On the highways with billboards, on the sides of buildings, on commercials, on this website (I don’t know where I would be without seeing vaguely porn-ish pictures of cartoon characters and “banned” shots from Harry Potter movies). One thing you really don’t see are advertisements revolving around pro wrestling, outside of the occasional inclusion of a WWE superstar on a “Characters Welcome” USA ad.
The purpose of advertising is to annoy people, but also to inform people of products and services that they might enjoy. While watching The Avengers, I saw a trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, presumably to inform me that if I enjoyed one big-budget superhero spectacle, I might enjoy another. On the other hand, if I’m at the local independent cinema theater, I usually see no trailers, or if I do it’s for something either in subtitles or recorded on a Flip for beer money and filmed in Grandma’s attic.
Where does the WWE advertise? Far as I can tell, pretty much nowhere. Granted, I live in a midlevel city in a flyover state and I am sans TV at the moment, so I’m not as connected as some of you out there, but from what I can tell there are no billboards, no bus ads on stops or the buses themselves, no TV ads during other sports or action-oriented programs, no one-pagers in men’s magazines (thinking more Maxim than… you know, “men’s magazines.”)… nothing.
Wrestling is kind of like comic books in the sense that nowadays you almost have to be indoctrinated into it at an early age, usually by an older male relative or amorous camp counselor. Otherwise, you have no idea what it’s about and whether it would have any appeal to you whatsoever.
With the unconventional superstars of today, such as the straight-edge CM Punk and the vegan Daniel Bryan, just how awesome would it be to see a cool, hip ad campaign aimed at cool, hip people? How about a billboard/magazine promo featuring different superstars and characteristics, such as
or
Furthermore, how about the art of promotion and cross-promotion? Yes, the cliché of the “gentle giant” and the “hey I dress in spandex but get this… I’m just a regular guy!” has been exhausted in TV and talk shows. What about having guys that seem to be legitimately quick-witted and funny and putting them on Conan and Jimmy Fallon, or on the endless number of talking head shows that vH1 and E! have? I’d love to see the commentary that Chris Jericho, Dolph Ziggler or Santino Marella would come up with. They’d probably do better than some of the C-List comedians they normally attract.
I know that wrestling (or “sports entertainment”) can attract a way more diverse, lucrative audience than the current one of kids and red state rednecks. Hell, a cursory look around here and our largely college-educated columnist and commenters should prove that. So why not spend some of that McMahon millions and hire some slick Madison Avenue group and seek people out?
Of course, you’d have to have a better product, which is a subject for past, and future columns…
