On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff pushed back on three decades of criticism over WCW running its pay-per-view at the Sturgis motorcycle rally, laying out the sponsorship math behind the decision. You can check out his comments below:
On sacrificing the gate:
“No, and they never do, because they don’t study the business the way they say they do. I probably gave up maybe $140,000, $150,000, maybe $200,000 in ticket sales — we were pretty hot back then — in exchange for probably four to six million dollars of new advertising and sponsorship. I’d make that deal three times a day if I could.”
On letting fans in free:
“I’d let people in for free if they were willing to ride up on their motorcycles and make a bunch of noise and have a bunch of fun. And I was able to attract millions of dollars worth of new sponsorship that was otherwise impossible to get. Nobody in the gas and oil business, which they call the automotive industry in the ad space, wanted to spend a nickel with WCW until they did, and the reason they did was because of Hog Wild.”
On why people hated the change:
“Possibly, and the card was great. It was a solid card. Ric Flair and Eddie Guerrero — I’d like to go back and just watch that. That had to be a great match. But people are weird, especially those that feel the need to speak out against certain things. Nobody likes change. The minute you do something different, many people react negatively because it’s different. It’s not what they expected. How dare you.”
On giving each pay-per-view its own identity:
“For me, I took the opposite approach. We had 12 freaking pay-per-views a year. If I couldn’t find a way to give each one of them its own unique personality, I wasn’t doing my job. We’re targeting men 18 to 39. That Harley Davidson demo, that Sturgis demo, was our sweet spot for wrestling. It was a perfect choice to give that event its own unique personality, to brand it so that it felt unique and different than the other 11 pay-per-views that we were trying to motivate people to watch.”
On having to go where the sponsors were:
“Go to Sturgis tomorrow. Charter a jet, fly there tomorrow, walk up and down the street. You’re going to see two types of sponsorship: it’s liquor and it’s gas and oil, and you’re going to see a ton of it. Well, I wanted some of that, and in order to get some of that I had to go where they were. They weren’t going to come to an arena and sit there with a bunch of wrestling fans. We had to go to them. We had to prove that we were a viable, sponsorable media opportunity to advertise in, and we did. The audience loved it. Sponsors loved it. It was a success to everybody except for Dave Meltzer and a couple of dirt sheet writers like him, because they must have studied the wrong book or something. I don’t know.”
