MMAPayout.com has, in the past, featured fan-made promotional videos and highlight reels of certain fighters or events to demonstrate the skills and expertise that the MMA fan base possesses. This latest clip by KaHL-One is perhaps the best yet:
Payout Perspective:
The video might be a little too long for the average attention span of the casual fan, but it’s exactly the type of creativity and evocative story-telling that MMA needs to capture the mind of the mainstream consumer. It gets their adrenaline and blood pumping, and suddenly they want to see more: “where and when can I see more of Georges St-Pierre crushing people into the fence and ripping their arm to shreds?”
The UFC absolutely must encourage more of this type of fan interaction; link it to a contest, employ some of these kids, do whatever it takes to start producing and disseminating content like this. It’s a very cheap form of advertising, it’s often very well-produced, and in addition to generating more interest amongst casual fans, it also builds a stronger relationship with the hardcores creating the content.
Just imagine the storm of publicity and fan interest that the UFC could generate with a social media driven fan contest to create promotional or highlight content for certain events. Give away a free trip to UFC 116, for example, to whoever creates the video that gets the most hits on the internet before Friday, June 25th, and fly that person out to the event, give them ringside tickets, and put them into a nice hotel. Then leverage the UFC’s existing social media foundations to launch an aggressive campaign featuring the video on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
This is the future.
The problem with all content production companies is that they can’t get out of the mind set of always wanting to have complete and utter control of their content. If the UCF was to do as you suggest they would be saying that is is OK to use their content for creating things like this. Where would people get the clips to use in it? Off of youtube or other such sites which the UFC is totally at war with. Or they would convert their broadcast recordings to clips for inclusion when all the content companies say that format shifting is illegal.
It took the record companies a decade to realise taking off the DRM and other issues that tick people off is better for their business than the iron fist approach. The companies that produce video media are just getting started on repeating all the mistakes that the music guys made. Break this story out again in a decade and you might have a chance.
I absolutely agree that this is the biggest obstacle for the company, but in the current business world you’re never going to get something for nothing – progress always comes as the result of sacrifice.
Funny to note that Zuffa has now claimed copyright infringement and had the video removed. I think that’s a poor choice. They really need to sit down and put together a policy that allows for this sort of creativity and fan interaction, while also protecting their own interests.
The problem with allowing every kid with a comp to create these videos is it floods the market. If there is 5,000 videos hyping different aspects of UFC 115. It will get to were people just over look them. You cant watch them all. Then all of a sudden the Offical trailer from the UFC is lost in the shuffle. The UFC promote their own agenda be it this or that fighter. Fans my be promoting a different angle the UFC dont want at the same time taking viewers away from the Official trailer. Not to mention most of the people on the web are not only using stolen UFC footage but are using music they dont have rights to also.