Opinion: Accidental Anti-Hype Material
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.
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So naturally, we need to talk about the Ultimate Fighting Championship's posters and video teasers.
This is far from a life and death matter. This is not a question of
athlete safety, labor rights or fighter pay. Nonetheless, I was
truly struck by the conversation that sparked on social media this
week when the UFC uploaded a seemingly generic UFC on Fox 23 teaser
and then released a truly lame poster for UFC 209 -- a poster that
was legitimately so devoid of artistic vision or passion that it
actually shocked an MMA populace that has become accustomed to a
lazy and terrible philosophy of art.
Early this week, the UFC put out a standard hype trailer for the Julianna Pena-Valentina Shevchenko card on Fox. This seems like the epitome of mundane, especially as the UFC's daunting schedule over the last few years has seen the company often turn to a paint-by-numbers style of promotion, typically cranking out the most formulaic barker material possible. While MMA may have a uniquely terrible aesthetic -- this is a sport that helped turn Affliction into a true cultural affliction -- this was something different. This was not an aesthetic question; it was a technical one.
Now set aside all the jokes I just made about the Zuffa-led UFC's artistic trappings. You may find it annoying or funny that the UFC still leans on the audio stylings of Stemm's “Face the Pain” regularly and bemoan the company's artistic taste, but even when the UFC has had a half dozen events in a single month, the promotion has long churned out media of a certain quality. It may not be compelling, but there's a precision to it. Outside of the actual fights, the UFC's product may not ignite your senses most of the time, but Zuffa helped establish a certain kind of standard across the board for its production; and even if it may be artistically worthless, it was effective. One long-running UFC trope: For the last 10 years or so, once the company blew up after “The Ultimate Fighter,” investors, media power players and business types would all come away impressed with how the UFC's production machine ran. Again, it is mostly artless, but it ran like clockwork and for the most part demonstrated a certain level technical rigor.
The teaser video I referred to earlier has been scrubbed from the UFC's official Youtube account, and with good reason. Fortunately, you can see -- and more importantly hear -- a mirror of it here. Now, I'm a stickler for audio-video quality and fidelity. I grew up downloading UFC fights on IRC and Napster at 360x240 resolution and listening to music with 128-kilobyte-per-second bitrates. Seeing pixels or hearing some tinniness doesn't really bother me; and on the audio side, I certainly don't have the discerning ear some folks do. That's why it shocked me when I watched that UFC teaser: If even I can tell how amateurish this is, what are other people thinking?
On the surface, it seems like any other UFC hype trailer, with some highlights of the particulars involved and Joe Rogan soundbites over them. However, when you actually watch it, even an untrained eye can tell how poorly edited the video is, with insanely elongated slo-mo clips that seem haphazardly thrown together. There's an incredibly long portion where Rogan's voiceover just disappears for a minute while they show random highlights of Donald Cerrone and Jorge Masvidal.
The audio? Well, you have ears. Does that sound like any professional hype video you've ever seen? Again, I'm hardly a hard-line dude about audio quality, and even I find it almost unlistenable. The timbre of Rogan's voice completely disappears, like he's speaking to us from a parallel dimension, and the soundbites they use are so brutally disjointed that it emphasizes an underpinning conceit of some of the UFC's in-house media, the fact that like any company it re-uses old media and appropriates it to sell things. This is fine if done artfully, but this particular trailer seemed like a high school editing project and an unfinished one at that.
It is no surprise that the UFC yanked the video, presumably as soon as a public relations flack saw MMA fans on Reddit and Twitter lambasting the company. However, the UFC's week of rotten promotional material was far from over.
On Wednesday, UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley tweeted out the official UFC 209 poster, ahead of his March 4 rematch with Stephen Thompson. The poster is terrible, and MMA fans uniformly pilloried it. Again, on the surface, it doesn't seem that different from other cookie-cutter UFC posters. Hell, FoxSports.com, a UFC media partner, actually wrote a news story about the poster. The piece doesn't kill the poster outright, but it's filled with coded language that certainly hints at the public's reception.
I got the exclusive! The Official #UFC209 Poster! See you in Las Vegas! @ufc #andStill pic.twitter.com/sPbQMX4NxZ
— Tyron T-Wood Woodley (@TWooodley) January 25, 2017
The worst part for the UFC? Australian digital artist @BossLogic did his own mock UFC 209 poster, and it is infinitely better than the one the UFC put out. Now, MMA has a particularly engaged fan base, and fan-made materials, highlight videos and the like have always been a crucial part of this sport. It is not new that an MMA enthusiast would crank out a mock-up poster and be met with acclaim. “The UFC needs to hire this person!” is a familiar refrain. However, as the UFC transitions under WME-IMG's ownership, this is a legitimate and resonant criticism.
@Bosslogic wow!!! @ufc Looks like you have some competition! pic.twitter.com/kUtwduZcuI
— Tyron T-Wood Woodley (@TWooodley) January 26, 2017
I'm not a complete idiot. I'm fully aware that a poorly edited hype trailer and a wack event poster are not going to sink the promotion. Honestly, it's not even the worst UFC poster ever; that honor probably goes to the UFC Fight Night poster for the Roy Nelson-Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira fight. Nonetheless, it's a stark reminder that WME-IMG's transition into ownership is larger than finagling television deals and trying to put together hot pay-per-view fights. The business of major fight promotion, especially for an entity like the UFC, has tons of miniature mechanisms that inform its business.
Under Zuffa's ownership, the UFC's production machine on every level was well-oiled, even if basically artistically bankrupt. It is instructive that even when appealing to a known, accepted template a UFC poster could still be so uninspired that it would provoke a serious response. In the grand scheme of things, it may seem small, but we are talking about a fighter poster and a hype trailer. These are the things that are supposed to get people excited about fights. These are the little things that can't be neglected, the seemingly minuscule agents that add up to business in the long run.
Of course, not every UFC event can get maximum promotion given the company's schedule and resources, but this is a pay-per-view, something for which WME-IMG wants people to pay $60. More than that, no one is mad that the UFC 209 poster isn't actually good; the rancor surrounds the fact that it's listless and uninspired even by previously established UFC poster standards. The UFC, under any ownership group, is never going to be putting out vintage Pride Fighting Championships-style posters, but look at how MMA fans reacted when the company stepped outside of its usual stylistic trappings for its UFC 181 poster.
A good hype package on YouTube won't make any fight do a peak of 10 million viewers on Fox, and the greatest poster in history won't dictate whether a pay-per-view does a million buys. However, that doesn't mean they're valueless. More than that, attention to detail matters. No one expects high art from MMA, but Zuffa got the fight promotion business down to mechanized science. At this point, the UFC may need a refresher course.
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