Do I have your attention now? What Is the UFC?* The Ultimate Fighting Championship is an organization that stages fights between mixed-martial arts fighters.
Two men enter an octagonal ring that is enclosed in chain-link fencing and then proceed to kick and punch each other until either 3 rounds of 3 minutes is up, one of the two fighters “Taps out”, or the referee calls the fight.
Advertise Everywhere* The fight fan in me was up for watching some serious physical confrontations.
What this means is that unlike as in boxing, the fighters don’t really have their own “Corner”.
What caught my eye was that as the fighter entered the ring, his support team would crawl up the outside of the fence and drape a banner over the inside of the fence.
The end result was that during the 2-5 minutes that each fighter was in the ring before the match started they were almost constantly being filmed and the logos on the poster filled every TV screen in the bar that I was in.
Just to take this idea one step further, the fighters themselves are also walking billboards.
You don’t wear a lot of clothes while you are doing this kind of fighting.
On the shorts of all of the fighters this evening were logos and brand names for various companies and products.
As long as the fight was going on, those brands were out there doing their work.
What this meant for the viewers was that during the evening we were constantly bombarded with ads for the upcoming fight.
Clearly what the UFC product managers wanted to do was to capture the excitement and anticipation that we were feeling and to try to associate that with their next fight.
Lead Up To The Big Payoff* Whenever you have a broadcast fight like this you need to make sure that your customers feel as though they are getting their money’s worth.
Each one of these events offered fighters that were just a little bit better known than the ones who came before.
The nature of this type of fighting is that that final fight might not last that long – somebody might win very quickly.
You need to be able to picture the scene: I was in a crowed bar and the UFC fight was on something like 20 screens that were on all around me.
The guys in the bar were watching the fights like guys do: somewhat reserved and wincing whenever a fighter got a good shot in.
They were yelling at the screen, standing up on chairs to get a better view and shouting things like “Kick him! Kick him” whenever a fighter fell down.
It really doesn’t matter what you think of UFC fighting.
If you’d like your product to experience the same type of popularity, you had better start watching more UFC fights…!
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