WEC 44 Impressions

World Extreme Cagefighting held its 44th event last night at the Pearl at the Palms in Las Vegas, Nevada featuring a featherweight championship bout between Mike Brown and Jose Aldo.

Attendance: TBA
Gate: TBA
Ratings: TBA

Payout Perspective:

Jose Aldo is the new 145 lbs champion. He demonstrated an outright SCARY take-down defense, which allowed him to pick Brown apart on the feet, and force Brown into making mistakes that eventually cost him the fight. Aldo is one of those extremely talented stand-up fighters that could potentially become a very strong draw for the organization. All language barriers aside, if he continues to knock people out, his appeal to the casual MMA fan will grow.

Hence, there are two ways to look at Aldo from a business perspective: 1.) Aldo has a tremendous amount of talent that may be wasted in fighting for the under-exposed WEC, or 2.) Aldo is just the type of fighter the WEC can leverage in order to gain a higher profile.

Either perspective forces us to revisit the following set of questions:

• Does the WEC have the resources – i.e., the support from Zuffa – to reach that next level of MMA popularity?
• Is there room for more than one truly BIG organization out there?
• The WEC seemingly has all the tools to be very successful, but why has it not really materialized yet?
• Are our expectations too high (influenced by their relationship with the UFC)?
• Moreover, can the UFC cope with adding another two divisions to its current line-up (three if you count the WEC’s plans to start a 125lbs. flyweight division in 2010)?
• Are lighter weights simply less appealing than heavier ones?
• Would it matter? Would it make a difference?
• etc.

They’re difficult to answer.

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Did anyone see the WEC/UFC and Assassin’s Creed promotional video?

Sponsorship is generally used as a means to generate brand recognition in the mind of the consumer. But sponsorship is often not strong enough to illicit recall – the ability of the consumer to remember and think of the brand at the next relevant occasion – because most of the time there isn’t enough product information exchanged through a sponsorship to create the necessary linkages.

The way in which many sponsorship guru’s advocate that sponsors and sports properties go about improving both recognition and recall is to better integrate the sponsorship message with the content of the sports property. The WEC and Assassin’s Creed II tried this tonight, but failed in some critical areas that likely made the promo ineffective:

• It was a hokey attempt to link the fighting in MMA with a character killing people in the video game.
• It was the type of disingenuous, scripted ad that makes MMA look second rate.
• There was very little about the actual product that was communicated to the audience.

It’s easy to see what the WEC and Assassin’s Creed were going for – quite frankly this is the type of sponsorship content the UFC/WEC need to start creating more of – but they need to do a better job of using their content in a way that will attract the attention of their target demo. Too many of them were rolling their eyes and switching the channel tonight.

The same amount of effort could have been used to produce a funny 30 second spot that linked one or two popular fighters with the game (and thrown in a bunch of information and action to boot). Or, they could have just sat the fighters down and filmed them as they were playing the entire time in order to get genuine reactions that wouldn’t have come off as fake.

MMA has this tremendous hold on a very powerful demographic. It’s the MMA content – the fighters, the personalities, and the action – that captivates the audience. The sooner sponsors and properties discover how to communicate through that content, the more effective they’ll be in reaching their audience and generating both recognition and recall.

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The McCullough-Darabedyan fight was yet another example of how complicated and difficult a process judging can be. It was a split decision in favour of Darebedyan – 30-27, 27-30, and 29-28. In other words, one judge scored the fight 30-27 for Darebedyan, one 30-27 for McCullough, and the third 29-28 Darabedyan.

The idea that each judge has a different perspective is well understood, but how two judges watching the same fight could disagree so dramatically – especially in this fight, where Darabedyan was clearly superior – only underscores the issue of judging.

We’re slowly building to the point in this sport where something is going to have to happen. The only thing the community can do is continue to highlight the mistakes and make an issue out of them – force the commissions to take action.