Minor news items that don't deserve a thread

[Loki]

I always had a sneaking admiration for that storyline.  When the McMcahons decide to kill one of their stars just because they don't like them, it usually makes for interesting telly.

Only in Wrestling could something that happen.  Plus it meant some Big Sexy on TV which I always like.

[ColinBollocks]

We're not clear of Jinder yet. Going by WWE logic, Jinder losing there was possibly because he's winning the title back, so Vince is doing the 50/50 deal. I truly hope not, because Jinder is the worst WWE champion, hopefully, ever. At least Seth Rollins could occasionally do an exciting match.

[BomberPat]

On ‎10‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 2:32 AM, Liam O'Rourke said:

Well...thats a turn up for the books. I know India was a long term play, but since that does nothing for the end game, the Jinder experiment is almost over. 

That they took the belt off Jinder, and pulled him from the Lesnar match, pretty much right after WWE's Q3 report was released tells me that once the figures were in, they realised he hadn't budged the needle at all in India, so they cut their losses - the fact that they actually cancelled shows on the Indian tour only cements that.

The experiment is completely dead. Personally, I've assumed it's because Jinder's Canadian - you might be able to package him as an Indian national hero outside of India, but I'd assume the Indian market will see right through it. That and a similar problem to what they face trying to break into China - it's a huge potential market, but that's not the same thing as a huge actual market. All WWE TV and PPVs air for free in India. They saw the huge internet fanbase as a surefire way to launch the Network over there, but it's ultimately meaningless - particularly given that, between the cost and low internet speeds, a streaming service is never going to take off in India.

Reading about it on the Indian Express website, though, came across this corker of a quote from Great Khali;

Quote

“When people think champions, they think Undertaker, Great Khali and John Cena. Nowadays, sometimes you need to go to the internet to find out who the champion is.”

Bring him back, that's the only way to nail the Indian market. All Khali, all the time.

[westlondonmist]

Mia Khalifa (former bongo flick actress) bad mouthed wrestling on her you tube sports show and Hurricane made a joke on twitter about how wrestlers' bodies take a pounding, and she has experience of that. Apparently her fans are not happy about it.

In all fairness she should just talk to her former co-stars from the industry, they all have in ring experience.

[PunkStep]

22 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Personally, I've assumed it's because Jinder's Canadian - you might be able to package him as an Indian national hero outside of India, but I'd assume the Indian market will see right through it.

Hmmm...I'm not sure it's that to be honest. Perhaps a little bit, but I think it's more simple than that and to do with the fact that nobody - in India and the rest of the world - buys into him because he's been an absolute jobber his career and is shit. There was a massive backlash when JBL won the title, and he was miles better than Jinder and was MUCH more charismatic. This was never going to fly. Khali was clearly shit, but he had a huge aura about him. Jinder is just a bit wank.

[BomberPat]

There's probably a massive amount of that too - but I do think that, given what a national hero Khali was for wrestling over there, they figured they could just repeat that. I may be wrong, but my interpretation is that they're a country with a strong (if complex, and often contested) sense of national identity, and national pride - and that if they see Jinder as being Canadian rather than "truly" Indian, they might not be prepared to buy into him as strongly as WWE expected.

But maybe you're right and I'm overthinking this - maybe India's wrestling fans just see him as The Other One Out Of 3MB too.

 

It makes me wonder how much merit there is in WWE's apparent strategy of appealing to emergent markets by giving them a "national hero" type - Jinder for India, the Chinese signings they've made, and so on. It makes sense on paper, but do audiences in these countries want or need someone purpose-built to appeal to them, or do they just want to see the big stars they're watching on TV? Is it a bit backwards these days to assume that the way to appeal to a new audience is to give them someone who looks like them, or is there still merit in that?

[Carbomb]

About Khali, I remember reading a report on here that WWE deliberately edited their shows for Indian broadcast to make heel Khali always look like a face, and they had his interpreter cut face promos in Hindi. I think that must have also played a part.

[PunkStep]

36 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

It makes me wonder how much merit there is in WWE's apparent strategy of appealing to emergent markets by giving them a "national hero" type - Jinder for India, the Chinese signings they've made, and so on. It makes sense on paper, but do audiences in these countries want or need someone purpose-built to appeal to them, or do they just want to see the big stars they're watching on TV? Is it a bit backwards these days to assume that the way to appeal to a new audience is to give them someone who looks like them, or is there still merit in that?

Good point, they also have Cezar Bononi, that Brazilian lad in NXT, so potentially another attempt to crack one of the emerging global markets. Over the past couple of years they've also added a Portuguese announce table for big events (which has a couple of Brazil flags stuck to it, just to make it clear which market they are aiming for!).

2 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

About Khali, I remember reading a report on here that WWE deliberately edited their shows for Indian broadcast to make heel Khali always look like a face, and they had his interpreter cut face promos in Hindi. I think that must have also played a part.

Did they do something similar with Jinder? I'm sure somebody mentioned it on here. Not sure how you can get away with it these days, what with social media. India is hardly North Korea!

[BomberPat]

15 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

About Khali, I remember reading a report on here that WWE deliberately edited their shows for Indian broadcast to make heel Khali always look like a face, and they had his interpreter cut face promos in Hindi. I think that must have also played a part.

Always a face, and usually the main event, no matter where on the card his match actually was.

When Khali interfered in the Punjabi Prison match to help Jinder, and raised the championship in the air afterwards, it made the front page of a few Indian papers, who just treated it as if Khali had won the World Title - because look, here's Khali, and he's got the belt, what else could possibly have happened?

 

I'm sure they do much the same with Mahal - maybe not editing to the same extent, but the Hindi announce team always put him over as the all-conquering babyface hero. It would be interesting to see how that actually translates to an Indian announce, though - apparently Triple H was getting cheered over him, and there were a smattering of "CM Punk" chants at the Indian show! From what I've seen online, a lot of Indian fans seem to - if not treating it as real - buy into kayfabe pretty strongly, but I don't know if that stretches to just believing whatever WWE tells them.

 

On the social media front, it comes down again to potential market vs. actual market. Apparently, despite being the second largest online market globally, apparently only something like 25%-30% of Indians actually have regular internet access or use social media, whereas TV ownership is around 50% across the country, up to 75-80% in urban areas, so there could be a huge market watching WWE TV without ever seeing any online or social media coverage.

[HarmonicGenerator]

To be fair, the UKFF saw this emerging Indian market coming ages ago when everyone was pegging Rohit as the man to take us into a new boom period.

[tiger_rick]

2 hours ago, BomberPat said:

There's probably a massive amount of that too - but I do think that, given what a national hero Khali was for wrestling over there, they figured they could just repeat that. I may be wrong, but my interpretation is that they're a country with a strong (if complex, and often contested) sense of national identity, and national pride - and that if they see Jinder as being Canadian rather than "truly" Indian, they might not be prepared to buy into him as strongly as WWE expected.

But maybe you're right and I'm overthinking this - maybe India's wrestling fans just see him as The Other One Out Of 3MB too.

 

It makes me wonder how much merit there is in WWE's apparent strategy of appealing to emergent markets by giving them a "national hero" type - Jinder for India, the Chinese signings they've made, and so on. It makes sense on paper, but do audiences in these countries want or need someone purpose-built to appeal to them, or do they just want to see the big stars they're watching on TV? Is it a bit backwards these days to assume that the way to appeal to a new audience is to give them someone who looks like them, or is there still merit in that?

I remember reading years ago that WWE would hire a ring announcer on foreign tours to announce in the native language. Somewhere like Japan or Mexico, the announcer was massively booed because they wanted the whole WWE experience. I said early into this that they're just assuming these people are stupid. Thinking they'd all go crazy for this jabroni because he's one of theirs. Sure, khali was a huge star but he was huge and booked like a huge star by WWE. Little kids in India or anywhere could have excitedly debated whether Khali or John Cena would win in a fight. Here they've fed a few guys out of nowhere to a job guy with little charisma and no-one has fallen for it, not even those backwards foreigners.

Hopefully this is the end of the experiment. What a pity they didn't give Naka the same push. It'd have done at least as well with him being pushed as an Asian Champion.Only it'd have been 800,000,000 times better

[tiger_rick]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

On the social media front, it comes down again to potential market vs. actual market. Apparently, despite being the second largest online market globally, apparently only something like 25%-30% of Indians actually have regular internet access or use social media, whereas TV ownership is around 50% across the country, up to 75-80% in urban areas, so there could be a huge market watching WWE TV without ever seeing any online or social media coverage.

Hull City's social media numbers are pretty decent for a club our size. A lot of it comes down to signing three Egyptians in 2012/13. There were Egyptian fans all over our FB and Twitter. I'm not aware it helped sell a single extra ticket and merch didn't move either.

[PunkStep]

They probably would've bought a shitload of merch if the team had a better brand identity, like being named The Tigers or something. They should consider doing that.

[BomberPat]

27 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

I remember reading years ago that WWE would hire a ring announcer on foreign tours to announce in the native language. Somewhere like Japan or Mexico, the announcer was massively booed because they wanted the whole WWE experience.

I would think probably Japan - my understanding of it is that a lot of Japanese fans saw "WWE" as something separate from pro-wrestling as they understood it, and saw it as more of a TV show, hence why you get so many WWE cosplayers at events there. They would turn up and cheer and chant the way they had seen on TV, because they wanted that experience, rather than behaving the way Japanese crowds usually used to respond, of the more polite applause and reacting only at key moments. Though the distinction between the two has blurred a lot in recent years anyway.

20 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Hull City's social media numbers are pretty decent for a club our size. A lot of it comes down to signing three Egyptians in 2012/13. There were Egyptian fans all over our FB and Twitter. I'm not aware it helped sell a single extra ticket and merch didn't move either.

And there's the rub. A few years back I was sent on a bunch of tedious social media training courses, full of seminars and workshops about how to "engage" with customers and so on. The one thing that nobody could answer on any of the sodding things was how do you actually make money from this? Still very few people have really cracked monetising social media, especially internationally. 2000 Twitter followers in Egypt aren't going to be queuing up in Princes Quay for a replica shirt.

[Carbomb]

There are more than enough ways to make social pay, that's why there are whole strategies dedicated to social marketing. The problem is that people get too focused on social media as an end as well as a means. It's like expecting your adverts to make the money instead of the products advertised.

If Hull haven't made money from the Egyptian exposure on social, it's because they haven't figured out how to capitalise on it yet, which means using a strategy that brings their product to the Egyptian fans. That's the connection between marketing and advertising: ensuring your product is in a position to be bought by those who want to buy it. Do Hull have any arrangements with sportswear stockists in Egypt to sell their merch? Have they set up a monetised HullEgypt YouTube channel with content either subtitled in Arabic or presented by an Arabic-speaking personality, and brought attention to through social, with perhaps competitions with prize draws for those who share/RT? Have they arranged any football tours of Egypt in the close season with promotion via the same method? I'm aware Egypt is not the absolute safest of places these days, so this one's probably a non-starter though. 

My digital marketing training's very basic diploma-level, but these are the basic methods of making money from social. 

Anyway, it's Egypt - I'm sure there's room for a pyramid scheme or two.