Welcome to the winter season! It’s December 1st and out here on the beautiful Jersey Shore we’ve got the whole gamut of winter weather to deal with! That’s right, 70 degree weather, people walking around in t-shirts and shorts, flowers in bloom…it was a gorgeous spring day today! Of course you can tell that I’m kidding and that I’m mad that it’s not cold and snowing outside right now, but I digress.
This week I’d like to talk about some grave mistakes that the management at Total Nonstop Action are taking. Hopefully, someone is paying attention to this.
As disgruntled as many former WWE employees are, it seems that they can’t get Titan Towers off of their mind. If you haven’t done it so far, click here and read this quick news update.
Back? Good!
The folks in Nashville don’t seem to “get” it. What they are doing with “VKM” a.k.a. Voodoo Kin Mafia (how stupid is that name, regardless of initials?) and their storming of Titan Towers in Stamford is NOT comparable to what D-Generation X did to World Championship Wrestling a few years back. When DX invaded WCW, they rode in on a tank and represented a brand that was just a hair away from beating the Atlanta-based promotion in the ratings. VKM represent a small, regional promotion that has much better things to worry about than being a nagging pain in the side of an international conglomerate.
You might ask what these “better things” are that Total Nonstop Action has to worry about. Well, for one thing – they need to start bringing in some decent ratings on their television show or they’ll be headed back to the wee hours of the morning. Sure, I know that Spike TV is putting a lot of investment in the brand by giving them a primetime Thursday night timeslot, but that doesn’t mean that the corporate powers-that-be won’t come down on that brand if they continue to hover in the 1.0 range. This promotion wants to play in the big leagues – it’s time to start bringing in big league results.
Regardless of any wrestling figurines or video games that might be on the horizon, the folks at TNA absolutely must do more to establish their brand. The initials “WWE” are known around the globe to stand for a distinct brand of professional wrestling. The initials “TNA” are known in certain parts of this country for a separate brand of professional wrestling. When TNA spends their time and money on sending old DX members up to Stamford and they flash that WWE logo during their air time, they are essentially reminding their small audience about that the bigger, more flashy wrestling promotion still exists. I don’t know who is making the business and TV-time decisions behind the scenes in Nashville, but the use of their air time for this purpose fails every Business 101 rule in the books!
To stay on their air-time problem for another moment – we are talking about a promotion that has a primetime television slot on a “guy’s” cable channel, but only an hour to work with. You take away the commercial breaks and the obligatory opening sequence, and you’re playing with a little more than 40 minutes of time each week. In those 40 minutes, this brand has to present a World Championship storyline, a World Tag Team Championship storyline, and an X-Division Championship storyline. They’ve got to cram Sting, Abyss, Jeff Jarrett, Kurt Angle, Christian Cage, Team 3-D, Rhino, VKM, Christy Hemme, Konnan & LAX, AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, Kevin Nash, Jim Cornette, etc into that single hour! It’s almost impossible to do, yet if you use your time wisely, it can be done. Spending one, two, or three minutes on a WWE-centric feature is a complete waste of time. Put Elix Skipper in the ring with AJ Styles and let AJ show the world why he’s phenomenal…don’t show WWE Headquarters!
The part of the online preview for the WWE-centered skit that I really didn’t like was when BG James yelled through the traffic cone to leave the fat, greased up stripper inside the building. What does this tell anyone who watches WWE? That apparently the competition watches WWE, too. What a ringing endorsement for your competition, huh?
With so many better uses for the scarce amount of time that TNA has in front of a national audience, I would expect better out of the “little company that could” than just showing a building and talking about a brand that is already a global powerhouse in the industry. Someone in that Nashville office needs to go back to school…and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone came on Spike TV and suggested that TNA Management asked “their teacher” Matt Striker for some lessons.
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