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EditorialWWE's Experiment with PPV Taglines Appears to Be Over (and Why That...

WWE’s Experiment with PPV Taglines Appears to Be Over (and Why That May Matter)

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Last year, Extreme Rules underwent a makeover and was rechristened The Horror Show at Extreme Rules. It was a silly name with an even more off-the-wall main event, but it was also a product of WWE’s marketing strategy at the time.

Funny enough, here we are at Extreme Rules 2021, and not only do we not have any gimmick matches announced yet, the idea of a tagline or subtitle is nowhere to be found. In fact, it seems as though WrestleMania Backlash was WWE’s last attempt at this tactic and we can officially call this dead for the time being.

Why is that? On top of that, you’re probably asking yourself “Why does this even matter at all, Tony?”

A Brief Recap

Many years ago, WWE used to add subtitles to pay-per-views. In particular, In Your House events weren’t just numbered, but titled things like “In Your House: It’s Time”, “In Your House: Cold Day in Hell”, “In Your House: Canadian Stampede” and so on. Some of those subtitles became events of their own, such as No Way Out, Unforgiven, Fully Loaded, Judgment Day and Bad Blood.

That eventually went away and it became standardized to just go with the name of the show and the year, or the number with WrestleMania (ie Royal Rumble 2007 and WrestleMania 23)

Starting with last year’s WrestleMania, this practice of subtitles came back:

  • WrestleMania 36: Too Big for One Night
  • Money in the Bank: The Risk is Worth the Reward
  • Backlash: The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever
  • The Horror Show at Extreme Rules
  • SummerSlam: You’ll Never See It Coming
  • Clash of Champions: Gold Rush
  • Survivor Series: The Undertaker’s Final Farewell
  • Superstar Spectacle: A Republic Day Blockbuster
  • WrestleMania 37: Back in Business

Then, we got WrestleMania Backlash, which wasn’t quite so much a subtitle as much as treating Backlash itself as a subtitle following up WrestleMania. It was strange and it’s doubtful many people at all liked it.

Since then, no other events have had subtitles, which I’m not only liking, but finding rather strange.

So? WWE Stopped. Big Deal, Right?

Theoretically, you can just look at this and say “and then they stopped doing that and the world kept turning.” By all means, this doesn’t mean it’s a hint the WWE Network is going back to on its own instead of Peacock or that Vince McMahon is selling the company or anything drastic like that.

What I do think it means, though, is that WWE realized it was a faulty marketing strategy and actively chose not to do it.

Also, and by proxy, I think that means several other things, namely:

  1. WWE took over an entire year to realize something wasn’t working.
  2. WWE is wholeheartedly moving on from the pandemic, whether the world is or not, and this is a subconscious sign of that.
  3. WWE is still looking for new strategies because things aren’t working.
  4. WWE firings and shake-ups could have killed this department.

Let’s break those down.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

The general rule of thumb in anything in life is that if something is working perfectly fine, there’s no need to tinker with the formula. You can always potentially improve on it and yield better results, but if you do, you run the risk of screwing something up. Often, it’s better to leave something be. At the very least, if it’s working fine, it’s not a top priority while you try to patch actual holes.

If WWE saw a boost in pay-per-view buy rates or subscriptions on the shows that had taglines compared to the ones that didn’t, we’d see an increase in this. It would become the standard again, where Hell in a Cell, Money in the Bank, SummerSlam and now, Extreme Rules, would have had subtitles.

Since we didn’t, someone made the call to not bother doing that anymore, which means they saw a reason not to do it. The numbers likely came back that there’s no direct correlation between these subtitles and fan interest or that it was the opposite and a negative.

Tenacity vs Stubbornness

It’s admirable when you fail and you keep trying to succeed. Eventually, though, you’re just being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge how you aren’t going to win and should give up and move on to something else.

The earlier you can pinpoint that you’re in the latter camp, the quicker you should stop wasting your time. It’s not easy, but it’s a sheer fact of life. Not everyone becomes an astronaut and you could probably be a fantastic lawyer if you went to law school instead of training for zero gravity exercises.

Whatever metrics WWE uses to test these things, the numbers should have come back a long time ago. By the fifth event at the very least, a trend should have been developed. At least by Survivor Series, there likely wasn’t a need to keep this experiment going any longer.

Still, WWE continued testing it out. Either someone was backing this idea and kept pitching that it was working and nobody could see it, they kept saying the next one would make a difference, nobody bothered to pay attention to this from the onset, or it took that long to get the analytics back.

The first of those scenarios is understandable, as is the second. Unfortunately, the latter two are negligence. A company this big should have people paying attention to those things. If WWE has a department that makes sure people say “medical facility” instead of “hospital” and will drum up “first time ever” facts that are fed to the commentary team to cram down our throats but are arbitrary as hell, someone should be paying attention to trends with buy rates and subscriptions under marketing strategies, just like they should be trying to figure out if a particular method of doing their pay-per-view graphics (posters and such) make a difference by putting certain people on it and so forth.

No More COVID According to Vince

WWE likes their grandiose statements. Any time someone can make a declaration, even if it isn’t true, the company thinks it’ll win over the fans who will just accept that as holy doctrine.

It works sometimes. Other times, it just comes off a bit hyperbolic.

WrestleMania 37 was finally in front of a crowd again and rightfully declared “back in business” with its subtitle. Then, the next three events (counting TakeOver: In Your House) promptly went back to the ThunderDome and Capitol Wrestling Center.

However, we knew Money in the Bank was going to be at Dickies Arena, SummerSlam would come to Allegiant Stadium and so on. Effectively, while WWE said “wait just a little bit longer”, they also said “because we’re not doing this pandemic shit anymore.”

Lo and behold, we don’t get any subtitles for pay-per-views from that point onward. Hell in a Cell is treated as though it doesn’t need something, like “One Last Chance” for Drew McIntyre or whatever.

My guess is WWE thought using these subtitles during this past year was a way to play into the cinematic matches and test out an approach of a more hokey, scripted television kind of product. Had they continued to go down this road, there’s a chance they would have toyed with things like “variety hour” and “a very special episode of ____” like sitcoms and other regular programming use.

Then, once the light was shone at the end of the tunnel (at least, from our current perspective), WWE said “screw all that, we’re done!” Based on how WWE purposely avoids any and all references to COVID as if putting their fingers in their ears and saying “lalala I’m not listening”, this mentality appears to be company-wide when it comes to projecting positivity to the fans. If you ignore it, it isn’t there, so shut up and come out to our shows and enjoy the product, damn it.

No matter whether or not another lockdown happens or anything of that sort, my guess is WWE is going to continue to turn a blind eye as much as possible. Subtitles for pay-per-views and stepping away from cinematic matches is an indication the powers that be are at least subconsciously “over it” and wanted to move on from that era as much as possible. Even if this could have been a good thing, it is representational of that time frame and was tossed aside because it was a reminder.

A Shiny New Toy

If that marketing strategy doesn’t work, let’s find a new one, right?

A good business will keep trying until something works, while a bad one will just keep throwing random stuff at the wall in the hopes something is an easy answer.

In some ways, WWE is both.

Rewind back to December 2020 when I was rewinding back to 2 years prior, in which the McMahon family went on Monday Night Raw and apologized for how the product had been as of late. WWE’s gone through many changes, but none of those changes have been what people have been asking for. They’ve just been random and usually quick attempts to find an easy catch-all solution.

Remember how there weren’t going to be any more automatic rematch clause excuses? Well, WWE realized they can’t operate without running rematches, so they’ve just replaced that with No. 1 contender matches. Lately, someone had the specific idea to tweak those to try to make them sound more appealing by calling each of those a Championship Contender Match. Do you care? Probably not. They thought there was a chance you would, though.

No more general managers, remember? So what do you call Adam Pearce and Sonya Deville? Renaming their position of power doesn’t change how they’re still authority figures operating exactly the same as how WWE has done it. WWE just doesn’t want to admit that that trope is something they lean heavily on and they don’t know what to do without that crutch. That in and of itself is fine, too, but it’s important to acknowledge that you need that crutch and that that wasn’t why people were tuning out to begin with.

Bad creative, lazy booking, a lack of star power (even more so now than ever), an attitude that WWE is entitled to constant forgiveness (ie, bitching that fans have no patience and that you’re doing “long term storytelling” only to drop your stories and then act like fans should still get invested in the next time that happens all over again, in a game of The Boy Who Cried Wolf) are why WWE fans are tuning out, not because of superfluous things.

At least one person in WWE thought subtitles for pay-per-views would help with the ratings. Whether that person woke up and smelled the roses on their own or was told to give up their marketing baby, WWE is clearly looking at other methods to try to drive attention to the pay-per-views that don’t involve subtitles.

Creative Has Nothing

There’s a chance that person who was pushing for those subtitles is no longer even in WWE, or that the people responsible for doing the grunt work of that marketing strategy are gone, at least.

Think of it this way. Let’s say this was Bruce Prichard’s idea (which I think it is, but that’s 100% unfounded speculation on my part just based on how he likes those types of gimmicks and this is from an era he was part of). If he says to the marketing people that they need pitches for what to call Money in the Bank 2021, they’re the ones coming up with ideas revolving around Sasha Banks and such. But if you fired a whole department that would have been working on that, suddenly, nobody’s around to think of these things because they’re doing too many other jobs to compensate.

Likewise, let’s say the idea of the subtitles was John Doe X’s pet project. Then, WWE fires John Doe X in one of its many rounds of budget cuts. That voice chirping on and on about how they should call SummerSlam “Your Summer Vacation Destination” was relegated to not being placed on almost any promotional material.

Going Forward

My guess is we won’t be seeing any more subtitles or prominent taglines for any pay-per-views for a while. Survivor Series is always promoted with brand warfare and such, so that doesn’t really count, but I don’t expect TLC or something in December to be labeled “TLC: Ending the Year with a Bang” or anything of that sort.

Hopefully, this means WWE is going to focus more on tangible changes to the creative showcase, rather than weak tricks to dress something up as fancier than it truly is.