http://www.mmafighting.com/2013/4/11/4213558/spike-tv-kevin-kay-lays-out-vision-for-bellators-future-growthAccording to a press
release from Spike TV and Bellator, MMA's second-most important
organization averaged approximately 861,000 viewers for their eighth
season, the first on Spike. While not matching the numbers UFC earned on
the same channel, Spike and Bellator framed the numbers as a
'knockout'.
While their star power was on
the rise prior to Bellator's move from MTV2 to Spike, Bellator champions
Michael Chandler, Pat Curran and
Ben Askren saw their popularity grow in conjunction with the platform change. In
the business of television ratings and star creation, Bellator's first
season on Spike has delivered commendable returns.
Yet, challenges remain.
Expensive and key acquisitions like 'King' Mo Lawal failed to move
through the tournament. Ratings were good, but inconsistent. There's
also still an open question about fan enthusiasm around the tournament
structure.
In this interview with MMA
Fighting, Spike TV President Kevin Kay looks back on what went right for
both the television channel and Bellator, what challenges remain that
must be addressed to grow and develop the partnership and what new
strategies or content both Spike and Bellator plan to deploy to further
move the needle.
Season eight of Bellator,
the first on Spike TV. It's wrapped. How would you characterize the
success, or failure, or generally how would you characterize this
season for you on Spike TV?It was a great season. We did
amazing ratings, you know, very pleased with the ratings. Every week
was terrific fights, and that's the key because great fights are what
ultimately makes a great promotion and a great TV show, and it brings
people back from week to week. I think, generally, if you look at the
Emanuel Newton fight where he knocks out King Mo (
Muhammed Lawal) very unexpectedly, and that was fantastic. But starting with
Pat Curran's demolition of Pitbull (Patricio Friere) on the very first fight that
was on Spike, right to Pat Curran's unbelievable surprising submission
on the last fight, and everything in between.
Whether it was
Ben Saunders'
head kick KO of (Raul) Amaya, or the (Ben) Askren, giving a fight like
you've never seen from Askren with terrific ground and pound. Every
week there was something else that was great, surprising, and it
brought the fans back. So I feel like we set out to tell people two
things - one, it's on Spike. Which was a goal of mine, because, even
though you are on MTV 2 for a couple of years, nobody knew that, the
Spike audience needed to know it was coming to Spike. I think that
coming home campaign, and the marketing campaign we put behind it
helped tremendously, set the table.
And, you know, explain that
it's a tournament. The tournament is a point of differentiation between
what Bellator does and what all the rest of the world does in the
world of mixed martial arts promotion, and I think we're very
successful doing that. So, I feel pretty good overall about the season.
The average ratings as I saw them were about 860,000 per
episode. Then cumulatively, which means the original broadcast plus the
replay, close to about 1.2 million. Headed into the season, was that
roughly your expectation that those were the benchmarks you were going
to reach?No. I never predict ratings. I think it's sort of a
fool's game, because you're never right. But just in my head, I
thought we're probably going to be in the 600,000-700,000 range. Maybe
we'll start a little higher, but that's kind of where I expected it to
net out. To be at 861(k) and to have started, like the first fight did,
over 900,000 viewers, and the last fight did over 900,000
viewers...and you mentioned the replays, so over a million on every
broadcast. Easily over a million. It's surprising. It speaks to the
quality of the fights. A lot of people wrote that 'they'll start fine,
but will people come back week after week after week'. And they did.
That's because they were seeing good fights. That's the only reason
fight fans show up, is good fights and people they want to watch. They
don't show up for me, Luke.
Did they show up throughout
the tournament, though? It's true that Pat Curran had good ratings when
he started on the first event and he had great ratings on the last
event when he fought. But it wasn't obvious to me that they (the
viewers) were following every single stage of the tournament through,
for all the different tournaments. Was some of it lost in all the glut
of all the different quarters and semis and bantams and welters? Was
there a bit too much going on there?Yeah. I would say, and
there's plenty of reasons for that. But I think one of the things that,
if I look back on the season and think about what we need to work on
going forward. We did a good job of explaining that there are
tournaments and that it's tournament-based. But I think we can do a
much better job of explaining to the fans, keeping them alert and aware
of what's going on each week, and how the tournaments are building,
and telling the stories of the tournaments. That's something we need to
work on.
Even syncing up what Jimmy (Smith) and Sean
(Wheelock), our commentators, are saying with the graphics packages and
spending some more time explaining what's happening each week and how
these tournaments are progressing. I think it's going to be key in
helping people to follow them. There are a lot of tournaments going on.
The reason that there's a lot of tournaments going on is that
Bjorn (Rebney) feels very strongly, and I agree, that we need to keep
our champions busy and tournaments are what create contenders and what
creates title fights. One of the big criticisms of Bellator in the past
was, and by the way, something that Bjorn was hearing from the
fighters was 'we're not getting enough fights'. The criticism from fans
was 'the champions aren't fighting enough'. You have to run more
tournaments to make more fights for the champions. But it does get a
little complicated, and I think we just have to work harder to sort
that out.
For someone like Askren, we know he's going to face
(Andrey) Koreshkov, and for someone like Chandler we know he's got
(Dave) Jansen and (David) Rickels coming up. Right.
There
is time to make some kind of promotional shoulder programming. Spike,
when they were with the UFC, they were able to produce all kinds of
shoulder programming and content and promotional this and promotional
that. To what extent are we going to see any of that for Bellator?You'll see it ramp up, and those are two good examples. So we're in the middle of doing the
Michael Chandler Unrivaled. We did the King Mo Unrivaled, which I loved and thought was
really well done. We're with the same guys who you know well, and
we're going to produce a Michael Chandler Unrivaled. And they're also
producing a 'The Russians are Coming' Unrivaled because of the wide
berth of Bellator Russian fighters. That will end and lead up to the
Koreshkov/Askren fight.
We've kind of gone a little slowly on
the shoulder programming, only because we thought our mission was to be
really clear about promoting week-to-week, the tournament. And now we
need to promote the reality show. But as we lead up to these other
fights, you're going to see more shoulder programming. And by the way, I
don't know that you want to do a lot of fighter profile, 24/7 kind of
things, about fighters that the audience doesn't know yet.
I
want to let the audience get to know these guys, like Pat and Michael.
Even though they might have a much wider fanbase among MMA fans, it's
great for fans to see the fight first, get to know a little bit about
them, and then to see something that lets them learn more about these
guys' careers. And dig a little deeper once they're actually fans of
the fighters, (rather than try to push that stuff out in the beginning
before they really get to see the fight. So that's the thinking, and I
think you'll see more shoulder programming.
The ratings were
good this season, sometimes really good. If I could just play Devil's
Advocate, I would like to say some people have brought to me the idea
that 'Bellator ratings are good, but they often come after a strong
lead-in, which is TNA.' To what extent can Bellator stand on its own,
or is it dependent on this incredibly strong lead-in programming from
professional wrestling?The answer is really hard to know.
Honestly, I think that we know a few things about the Impact audience,
the TNA audience. Some wrestling fans watch mixed martial arts, some
don't at all. I think what you're seeing, and this is true of all
wrestling promotions, is that there are a lot of wrestling fans that,
literally, this is the only thing they watch. They watch wrestling and
then they go turn off the TV. So it's a little hard to know for sure.
The
key for us was, 1) TNA and Dixie (Carter) have been incredibly willing
partners in helping promote Bellator, and do everything they can to
drive their audience to Bellator. For Spike, with Impact being one of
the highest-rated things on the channel, whether all wrestling fans or
not will move to Mixed Martial Arts or not, that gives you the greatest
possibility of that. But I believe that over the course of the season,
more and more people are coming to Bellator on their own. Not
necessarily just because of the lead-in. I think the lead-in helped in
the beginning, but I think Bellator is building its own fanbase.
Obviously, the goal is to create a franchise that can stand on its own.
And give it all the help you can give it in the beginning. And I think
we're going to get to a point not too far in the future where Bellator
will stand on its own.
Bellator's a really streamlined,
efficient product that can go week after week after week and do shows
in a way that literally no one else does, certainly not at this level
of the game. But I'm curious how you take that kind of product with MTV
2's treatment and go to Spike TV. What were you trying to do? In your
mind, what did it have to look like? For example, I like to bring up
you guys went to much bigger venues this year. The Santa Ana Star
Center, The Bojangles' Arena. There were new graphics package. But is
it just that? How did you want to make Bellator look different on Spike
TV than MTV2?The biggest and simplest answer to that is HD,
right? Because MTV2 has very limited HD distribution. I'm not even
sure what the number is. It's minor and they're trying to build that.
Moving to Spike puts you almost universally in HD which for sports
fans, for MMA fans, is what they expect to see the sport in. Even the
graphics packages that we did introduce on MTV2, we refined them a
little bit more for Spike. They just looked better. They looked
different just by virtue of HD distribution. I think we improved the
audio, we brought in a new lighting director for Spike.
I had a
very frank discussion with Bjorn that there's no ballrooms on Spike.
We can't go back to those kind of casino rooms with low ceilings that
don't look good on television. But we were, with no disrespect to MTV2,
saving it for Spike. The bigger venues, there was no real reason to do
them on MTV2 because we didn't have the same kind of expectations for
ratings and delivery that we were going to have to have when we got to
Spike. So we need to make it look bigger, sound better, and improve on
every level. And the graphics were a big part of that. Promotion was a
big part of that. We spent a good deal of money launching the
tournament in January. I think if you package it up all together, we
made a lot of changes.
To what extent is Bellator still new
on Spike? What I mean is, do you continue to iterate it for the summer
series and the fall series?What do you mean, iterate it?
Obviously
there's going to be some changes in terms of the Summer Series. For
example they're going to go from eight to four-man, so that's one thing
on the Bellator end. But on the Spike end, to what extent in terms of
the live Thursday night broadcast, do you say to yourself 'we need to
make more changes, we need to update this, this could this could be
better, I prefer that'?One thing I already touched on was
the need to clearly explain the tournaments more effectively. That will
be one thing we sit back and do. I think, storytelling. Now that we
have a good deal of fighters who are either amazing athletes or great
personalities or a combination of the two. Dig deeper and tell their
stories in a little more extended way.
I've pushed really hard
this season to, I want to see a fight in three minutes. I watch the
show, and if the audience noticed as much as I noticed, but, the first
couple of weeks into the broadcast it'd be seven or eight minutes into
the broadcast before we got to a fight and I was like 'I want to see
fighters in the cage when the broadcast comes up, ready to fight, and I
want to be fighting in three minutes'. That doesn't leave a lot of
time to do packages and tell stories about the guys.
But I
think that now we've established that, and we have guys that the
audience are starting to know, now we can spend a little bit more time
telling their stories and building their stories, and building their
storylines, frankly, through the tournament. Because there are a lot of
great stories that went untold this season just because of time.
Does
the tournament lend itself to storytelling? There's an argument to be
made that there's not a lack of talent in Bellator, or even rivalry.
That was able to be told between (Eduardo) Dantas and (Marcos) Galvao
this year, in the title fight. But that's at the finals. It's the very
very end, once there's already this history built. Is it hard to do
that in the quarter-final and semi-final stage?It's hard
only because you don't want to spend a lot of time talking about a guy
that might not be there four weeks from now. You going to have to pick
your bets, and count on Bellator to pick right and they won't always
pick right, witness King Mo. I think you can do that, and I think some
guys are going to have better stories that you want to tell. Like the
Doug Marshall story. I wish we could have spent more time telling his story and
building him up, whether it's a good or bad story, whether you love him
or hate him. That turns out to be a really kind of interesting story.
We didn't have the time to do it this time. As this guy progresses and
continues, hopefully, to win, I think you can do that. So I think we'll
have to pick and choose. You know, you might tell a guy's story and he
gets eliminated. But that's just part of sports.
You've got
Fight Master coming up this summer and the season is already shot and
completed if I'm not mistaken. In the editing stage now. I'm sure you
believe in the product, but to what extent do you believe you have to
either rewrite The Ultimate Fighter or rewrite fans' brains to get them
used to something else because all they know is The Ultimate Fighter?I
don't know. What I didn't want to do and what we asked our development
folks and Bertram van Munster and the people at Profiles with us, we
didn't want to repeat, and just do what they do. And it's very
challenging because, let's be honest, it's ultimately guys in a cage
fighting, and that part is not going to be any different. It's an
elimination show. So then it was like, how do you surround that with
something that feels different and gives the fans more value on a new
opportunity for a new show.
I really like the format, I think
the format is really going to be appealing to fans. Because you've got
four of the most fantastic coaches and fighters in history - you've got
Randy Couture,
who is dignity and class and great champion. Then you've got Frank
Shamrock who's an unbelievable champion but he's outspoken, and you
actually need to be reminded a little bit of how competitive Frank is,
and on the series you just see why he was a champion because he's so
competitive and so headstrong. Then you've got Greg Jackson, who in my
opinion is one of the greatest coaches in the history of the sport, and
brings all the other elements to play. How he's psychologically works
with fighters, how diet comes into play, how weight-cutting, his
theories on that.
Then you've got
Joe Warren,
a Bellator champion, who's the only guy of all those guys who has
fought in this tournament and can bring that experience to bear about
what you have to do in order to survive fighting every four weeks. And
he's a great character, Joe's just an exciting guy to be around and
again, they're all so competitive. So there's a lot of strategy, I
think there's a lot of meat for the fans.
And then you've got on
the other side of it, you've got these fighters. Luke, you will know
them all because you know this space so well, but for the casual fans, I
think there's a lot of names that they will know and there's going to
be names that they don't know at all that they're going to be exposed
to and surprised by. Fighting guys that they know of and they've seen
fight before, and I think you get a some surprising results in this
series. So I think it's got a lot of layers that are really
interesting. The coaches have to actually convince the fighters to come
on their team and I think that kind of competition between the couches
is kind of spectacular to watch. It's almost as if they're fighting
mentally as opposed to fighting in a case. As you can tell, I'm very
excited about it.
So, here's the thing about the reality show -
reality fans are different than fight fans. There's going to be a lot
of crossover because it's Mixed Martial Arts. But reality fans tend to
be a little bit of a different breed, and I think that's going to make
it a little bit of a wider audience. Hopefully we're going to do well
with the show and bring in even more viewers to Bellator, and the
influence of those ratings will be felt as we move into the fall
tournament.
Randy Couture is on the show, all those guys. Greg Jackson's on the show, Frank Shamrock's
on the show. Randy Couture has a deal with Spike, because he has a
development deal for another reality show about rehabilitating gyms and
whatever else is going on. Obviously the new ads are out and he's
featured prominently. To what extent, I know Jimmy Smith is the host of
the show, but how much does it revolve around Randy? Because it seems
to be the centerpiece of this.Randy is arguably, and Frank
would probably disagree (laughing)...Randy's arguably, because he has a
movie career as well, probably the biggest star on the show in terms
of broad, wide appeal and reach. So we started the campaign with Randy.
Next week we'll start running the Frank promo, and the week after that
it'll be the Greg promo and then the Joe promo. As you'll see on the
show as it evolves, it's very much an ensemble show. These guys get
just as much time. But Randy is Randy. He's a huge star and one of the
most respected people in the sport. Starting with him, for me, makes a
lot of sense. As you'll see as the show and the promotion evolves, it's
really about all four of these guys.
When Jon Fitch
was cut, he was still ranked in the top ten by most insiders
perspectives and it was sort of assumed that this would be a great
pickup for Bellator. Not because he was a UFC castoff and that people
still liked him per se, but this was still a very viable guy. And
Bellator right away through Bjorn Rebney
said 'probably not the right fit for us'. Now I understand the model,
building guys the Bellator way, finding them early and nurturing them
and turning them into stars. Okay, fair enough. But is there any
connection between what happened with Mo and passing up on Jon Fitch?
Yes Mo is a popular guy and probably nine times out of ten would be
Emanuel Newton, but he didn't and they had invested some money in him,
and now they're sort of left holding the bag. No, there's
no connection. I think it's a different, it's completely different. I
think that Mo, I know we believe strongly, I certainly do, that Mo's
going to come back big and he's going to be knocking guys out and be a
challenger for the championship and we're all behind that. Mo has an
unbelievable personality in addition to great skills in the cage, and
he's a great character. He's a devoted spokesperson for Bellator, he's
on the team.
Jon Fitch, I leave it to Bjorn to talk about why, I
mean that was his call. We actually didn't even really talk about it. I
think that decision is based on - partly about money, partly about
style, and partly about personality. And not feeling like adding him in
this moment in time was going to be the right fit for him. That
doesn't mean that it wouldn't happen someday, just that it wasn't the
right time for him. Maybe it wouldn't be, I don't know, but I'd leave
that to Bjorn.
Nobody is suggesting anything other than Bellator being the number two promotion, but there was the growth of the World Series of Fighting,
that has a very different model and who is doing something very
different. But I can tell you anecdotally that there seems to be a
strong sense of fan enthusiasm. I'll also tell you something
interesting. If you study web metrics, not just on MMA Fighting but
across the board if you talk to editors, the traffic for World Series
of Fighting, despite being on a much lower rated network on NBC Sports,
the web traffic is extraordinarily high and much higher than that of
Bellator with the exception of Bellator's live stream posts. Bellator
does much better ratings, it can do week-in, week-out shows, it has a
huge network behind it - why does there seem to be a fan enthusiasm
gap?I don't know, it's a good question. I don't necessarily
agree with that. Web traffic, I sometimes I'd compare to people that
call into radio shows. They do it over and over again and they have
their own agenda. It's always hard for me to believe that that's
exactly the right metric that I want to look at. I just look at ratings
and tell you from an enthusiasm point of view, 861,000 people on
average per week are watching Bellator. And it's hard to do fights
every week and draw those numbers and promote in the way that you need
to promote week to week because you've only got six days from the end
of the fight on Thursday night to the next fight. Whereas something
like World Series of Fighting has, you know, how long was it between
their first fight and their second fight?
Several months.Yeah.
They have a long time to build up and promote. And they're also
signing some guys that have some name recognition. They're more in the
business of signing up guys that have left the UFC, and those guys have
their fanbase and their fanbase is probably pretty vocal, but I'm not
sure how big their fanbase is at this point in their career. Which
might be indicative of what the ratings turned out to be, which was
something like two-hundred-and-something thousand viewers.
Bjorn's
position, and I support it, is we really, truly want to build our own
stars. The Chandlers and Pat Curran's of the world. The King Mo's. Mo's
an exception because he did come from
Strikeforce,
but I generally want to build up guys that start with the promotion
and build them up and then I think the passion follows. I think that's
ultimately what's going to drive passion, is guys that you've become
fans of and you stick with, and you get involved in their careers. It's
just a different model.
Two of the guys that have been the
biggest successes with that model, in fact, because they both came
through the tournament when they were newer in their careers, were Pat
Curran and Michael Chandler. How would you describe their ascendancy
this season? If they can keep winning, what can Bellator do for them?
Will you put them on the reality show? I know you must have big plans
for them, so give me some sense of how you think you can continue to
leverage their surging popularity.I think those guys make
their own popularity in a way. We put them on the very first fight card
that we put on Spike and that was a heavily promoted fight card. We
did have time to ramp up for that and we spent, like I said, a good
deal of money to do it. And those guys delivered hugely on that card.
So they're making their own fanbase. I think Chandler, at this point,
he didn't have another fight during this season. We had a little bit
more time with him. We got him involved with Dave & Busters, one of
our sponsors, and he's in this fantastic spot. He's great in it.
They've been to the Guys Choice Awards, the movie awards, they've
walked the red carpets. Chandler is actually on the reality show, he
makes a guest appearance on the reality show. I'm not sure what
episode, but about halfway through the season he shows up.
So
we're going to do everything we can to use all the resources that we
have to build these guys up and make sure that the fans know them.
These franchises are built on fighters. Great fighters is how you build a
great promotion, and these guys are clearly very devoted to Bellator.
Everyone wants to get paid of course, and they should be, but they're
very devoted to Bellator. They like being a part of this family, they
succeeded in it. And we're going to do out best to make them happy and
to build them up into stars and get them fights. At the end of the day,
this is what Michael Chandler said to me. He's like 'I just want to
fight. I love doing all this stuff, I love doing commercials, I love
coming to the Barclay Center and giving out the ball to the Brooklyn
Nets for the referee and having 18,000 fans go crazy. But nothing
compares to the experience of getting the cage and fighting'. So he
wants to fight as much as he can fight, and I think that's the
obligation of the promotion to make sure that happens for him. Because
that's how he built his career, that's how he gets more sponsors, that's
how he makes more money.
For as good as the ratings
were and as many new faces that fans became familiar with, and as
popular as Chandler and Curran may have been, there's still the
question looming out there about pay-per-view. Can you update us as to
what extent there's any interest or movement on the front of taking
Bellator onto that format?I think it's going to happen. I
don't want to give any dates or make any predictions about when just
because right now I think we're at a very delicate time. If you're
going to ask fans to pay for fights, if it become a premium purchase
for fans, you've got to be able to put great fights on a jam-packed
card. And I think that's Bjorn's obligation to the fans and he's very
serious about fulfilling it, and I don't think it's right it's right to
do a pay-per-view until you have a card that's filled with, whether
it's championship fights or fights that people want to see, or just
fights that people want to pay for. I think he's well on the way to
getting there, I think he's building really well. It is in the future,
but we've not settled on the time frame yet.
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