Views From The Turnbuckle: WWE's Sad Attempt At Creating A New Audience

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of WrestlingInc or its staff.

After a very awkward segment on Monday between talk show hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, WWE announced that next week, not one but two "celebrities" will be appearing on next Monday's Raw. The first one will be former stripper and Real Housewives of Atlanta star NeNe Leakes. The second host will be the venerable Todd Chrisley of the reality show Chrisley Knows Best.

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Regarding Todd Chrisley, at least that makes relative sense. His show airs right after Raw, and it isn't uncommon to have a star from another USA show appear on Raw to promote their upcoming season. What Miss Leakes is doing on the show, I have no idea. Like, literally no idea, and I think it is a disturbing sign about where WWE thinks it can attract viewers from.

The show Leakes is famous for, Real Housewives of Atlanta is a hit show by any statistical measure. It regularly clears 4 million viewers each week, and for better or worse, those people are legitimate celebrities in America. In theory, it would benefit to have Leakes on the show, because some of those 4 million would tune into Raw to see her.

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The problem of course, is that is there likely isn't that much of a crossover audience between Real Housewives of Atlanta and wrestling fans. It is one thing for WWE to have a football star, a Rock n' Roll band or a rapper on Raw; those fields have proven to have similar fanbases. For Real Housewives of Atlanta, I am incredulous to believe that fans of that show also happen to be big wrestling fans, or at least interested enough in wrestling to tune into see what Leakes might be doing.

Maybe the point of the tie-in is that there isn't a big cross-over audience. Maybe WWE is banking on people unfamiliar with the product tuning into Raw and getting hooked on wrestling. According to TV by the Numbers, about 2/3rd of audience for RHOA are adults between 25-54, most of them women. If you have ever been to a WWE show, you know that women between those ages do not tend to make up a great amount of the fans. I guess there may be some similarities between the sleaziness of bad reality television and pro wrestling, and I'm no marketing expert, but I just wouldn't bank on a lot of RHOA fans tuning into Raw and coming back week after week.

In the long run, Leakes' appearance on Raw is probably going to be very short and forgettable. I don't believe Leakes is going to take over the show and ruin the entire three hour broadcast. However, I think the Leakes appearance is just another example in a long line of tireless efforts for WWE to try and extend its marketing horizons, while ignoring their core demographic. It almost seems like WWE has accepted that they are never going to increase the number of casual fans from what they already have in the normal male, 18-34 demographic, and have since targeted a new audience.

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The success of Total Divas has had a hand in developing that philosophy. Before it debuted, I figured Total Divas would be a hit. It had nothing to do with the actual writing and production of the show, I just figured that television shows involving attractive women being catty towards each other tend to be ratings gold in 21st century America, and Total Divas fit right into that category.

While Total Divas has certainly been met with ratings success, it hasn't really translated to success for WWE's main programing. Ratings have been pretty much the same over the last few years. I don't really think the same people watching Total Divas are also going to clear out three hours each week to watch Raw, just because some of the Divas are showing up for 10% of the show.

This new philosophy for building an audience has probably led to some of the less savory moments of WWE programming. The angle between Stephanie McMahon and the Bella twins in particular is evidence of a shift in targeted programming. To most wrestling fans, the angle has come across as boring, lacking in direction, and overall just being extremely unentertaining. One thing every wrestling feud should have is an answer to the fan question: Why should I care? The Bella feud has failed miserably to address that question, and that is mainly why it is being met with so much animosity. It is a storyline ripped right out of a soap opera for bored housewives, only WWE lacks the creativity and the actors to convincingly pull off the angle in an entertaining fashion.

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WWE has always been light on the wrestling part and stressed the entertainment part of their name. We are never going to see a Raw with three straight hours of in-ring action, and frankly, that philosophy probably wouldn't work out to well. Entertainment segments, whether it be a promo, a vignette, a backstage interview, they all help break up the matches and move storylines along. Plenty of the most memorable moments in wrestling history have been entertainment skits and not real wrestling matches. Didn't it make any wrestling sense to have Kurt Angle come out in a dairy truck and spray milk on the entire Alliance? Of course not, but it was damn entertaining.

The difference between something like that and what we are currently seeing is that the best entertainment aspects of wrestling come from things stemming from actual wrestling contests. Entertainment is great, but the root of all programming really comes back to the actual in-ring sections of the shows. We like our entertainment, but we only like it when it involves tangible logic, angles that wrestling fans are conditioned to understand and accept. A lot of the entertainment segments WWE produces now are way out of left field for wrestling fans, and that is because they are not aimed at wrestling fans, they are aimed attracting a new audience to the
show.

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While WWE is stuck chasing after a new group of fans, they are alienating fans that already follow the product. A bad segment like the typical Bell drivel leads to wrestling fans turning the channel. Essentially, WWE sometimes seems more concerned about the fans they don't have than the fans they do have. What is depressing is that WWE, with the minor exception of TNA, is the only group broadcasting pro wrestling every week to a national audience. Wrestling is what separates WWE programming from everything else, yet WWE seems content to try and mimic other shows on TV.WWE is pretty much the only company really supplying wrestling to mass audiences in the United States (TNA has the ability to do so, but when they are drawing crowds of 5,000 or more consistently, they don't qualify as mass audiences) so it is sad to see them tried so far away from wrestling.

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