Vince McMahon On NBC Stepping Up Their RAW Promotion, WWE Asked About Fox - WWE NXT Rumors
WWE Chairman Vince McMahon indicated during Thursday's WWE Q2 Earnings call that NBCUniversal officials are looking to do better with their promotion of the WWE RAW show.
An investor asked about how much promotion Fox will be doing for SmackDown. WWE Co-President Michelle Wilson took the question and talked about what Fox has planned, and how excited WWE is about the opportunity.
"As Vince mentioned, we are extremely excited about the opportunity to partner with Fox," Wilson said. (H/T to Seeking Alpha for the transcript.) "In terms of exactly what they're going to do for any of you that have been watching NASCAR or any of the other broadcast that Fox has been doing. They're already promoting SmackDown through integration into their current broadcast they're already doing that. What I will say that, that will be dialed up significantly as we get into the month of September. Obviously, as we talked about in the past, they put together 1 of the strongest promotional plans I've seen in my time in terms of leveraging their Thursday night football packages, what they have with baseball, again what they do with NASCAR. So on their Sports side, absolutely in every major sports broadcast that they have, WWE SmackDown will be promoted. In addition to that, they obviously have a strong programming on the entertainment side. So it won't be exclusive to just Fox Sports, it will also be their entertainment programming as well. They're doing some really besides just kind of the traditional promotion with(inaudible) , if you will, they're also looking to integrate us into their programming organically whether it's the Messenger or some of the other shows that they have coming out. So again, I'm not going to get into the specific detail around the economic value of what they're promoting but suffice it to say, that it is significant and to Vince's point earlier, given the number of households they reach, this is 35% higher than what we do on USA Network partnered with that level of promotion is the reason why we're really excited coupled with where storyline is going that we see this as a real opportunity come October."
Vince then spoke up and said WWE is under the impression that NBCU is going to up their promotional efforts for WWE's flagship show.
"At the same time as far as promotion is concerned, we've been led to believe as well that NBC is going to up their promotional efforts and they can equal Fox. But again, they do now are in a more competitive situation obviously and wanted to do much better with RAW," Vince said.
In other TV news from the earnings call, an investor asked about the rumors of WWE NXT being brought to FS1, potentially to go up against AEW on Wednesday nights. WWE Co-President George Barrios wouldn't respond directly to the rumors, but he talked about WWE creating content, and noted that one of the constant internal discussions is what content to create and where the best place to air that content is.
"I think we said this before, create 1,500 hours of content across a variety of different genres, including about over 300 in ring content," Barrios said. "And for every piece of content, we need to evaluate what's the best platform. Wasn't that long ago that if you wanted that content seen by someone you have 1 choice, you have to find multiple partners around the world to reach any audience. Today, you can still do that. You can go direct and have it supported by advertising and reach after world's population. Or you can do a direct and have it supported free subscription advertising. So that's to your question applies to everything. And we've got always (inaudible), we're trading a lot of things like economics, engagement, reach, reaching new audiences. So it applies to everything including NXT. We're not going to talk about NXT's specifically about it's a constant discussion probably what we spent the most amount of time internally talking about is what content to create and what's the place best place for it."