Last week CBS began to increase the amount of promotion surrounding its up-coming Strikeforce: Saturday Night Fight event that will feature Fedor Emelianenko vs. Brett Rogers on primetime television.
In addition to the commercial below, M-1 has been teaming up with social networking website namedrop.com to purchase ad space on various websites including Sherdog.com to advertise a special contest.
Payout Perspective:
It’ll be interesting to see where and how often CBS chooses to use the clip.
If the network is looking to score on the MMA demographic, they’d be wise to strongly target the NFL Sunday crowd that represents America’s largest television audience for M18-34.
Note: In a recent ESPN Sports Poll, MMA ranked just second to the NFL in terms of M18-34 demographic viewership.
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I’d never heard of namedrop before, but it appears to be a social networking site dedicated to following celebrities. It seems to encourage people to sign up for $2.99/month in order to gain access to the latest news, personal photos, and other information related to certain “important” people the globe over.
How associating with namedrop.com is going to help Fedor remains to be seen. The website itself ranks in the high 700k range on Alexa.com.
I suppose M-1 management is making a concerted effort to raise his celebrity profile on a number of different fronts, and this is just one of many pieces to the puzzle.
who would pay 2.99 a month for something they can get for free on the net. i haven’t seen much from strikeforce, just those short fedor promos, which don’t show much, just him hitting a heavy bag. when are they gonna start promoting his opponent, brett rogers? or the gegard/soku fight? or the mayhem/shields fight. they need to do alot more than what they are doing now. fedor is 10Xs the fighter kimbo is, but kimbo is 10xs the draw than fedor. right now, they are acting like affliction lite, everythi9ng revolving around fedor, who is not a draw. they need to do a countdown type show. those shows alway get fans more pumped for fights and events a week before the fight. if strikforce continues with this slow a pace, they will fail. where;s the money gonna come from. cbs is in dire straights financial wise, so i don’t see them throwing a bunch of money around. i’m estactic that strikeforce is giving us such a great free show, but 1 free show, does not make for a successfull mma org. the ufc gives us a ton of free events, and great ppv shows, that way they can actually pay the fighters the money they deserve and keep the sport growing. strikeforce reportedley paid gegard 2k for his last fight with babalu. i know they paid more than that, but it will have to be alot more if they want to keep him and shields and rogers. i can’t say that i’m too impresed with the “new and improved” strikeforce yet, so i’ll wait until the 7th and hope for the best. whew!
Showtime will be airing a “Fight Camp 360” special for Rogers vs Fedor. That is great news for them.
http://mma.fanhouse.com/2009/10/19/showtime-to-air-fedor-emelianenko-vs-brett-rogers-fight-camp-3/