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Has Affliction Successfully Marketed their debut show?
By Zach Arnold

I have to give credit to the PR staff of Affliction. Never in my entire life have I received as many PR offerings from one promotion for a debut show as I have from the Affliction office. Affliction claims that they are issuing over 250 different press credentials for this weekend’s event at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California.

The fighter purses are large and the costs for this debut show are very high. Southern California is a pretty expensive place to do business in, especially when you’re a fight promoter.

Now, Josh Barnett (who is fighting Pedro Rizzo on the card) makes a point. Since when should keyboard warriors whine and moan about how much money a promoter is spending to put on a show? After all, isn’t it that person’s right to spend their money however they so choose?

Well, I can understand the trepidation of many MMA fans in regards to the Affliction debut MMA event. After all, how many MMA start-ups have fans seen in the last couple of years that have ultimately failed and fallen to the way-side? A lot.

The Affliction MMA event is going to be fascinating to watch, for many reasons. You can call the promotion PRIDE-lite given how many PRIDE veterans they have booked on the card. Fedor, Barnett, Rizzo, Alexander, the list goes on and on. In a sense, the Affliction show does have a feeling similar to PRIDE’s first event in Las Vegas in 2006.

However, the PRIDE American shows seemed to have a narrower, more-focused marketing campaign than the Affliction debut coming up.

Look at some of the advertising Affliction has done so far to hype their July 19th event. They’ve spent a lot of money on ad buys in Times Square and in the New York Times. The NYT ad wasn’t even a PPV-detailed specific ad; it was just an ad with Fedor & Sylvia. Why would someone spend a ton of money in the New York media market and not give out the particulars for their PPV or house show campaign?

Then there is the issue of cable ads. Seen any for the Affliction show? Likely not. At least PRIDE had barker advertising on DirecTV and the TV Guide channel, plus a show on Fox Sports Net. Affliction will have part of their show air on FSN, but I have not seen any advertising for it at all.

Affliction has done some things right in hyping the show and politically-speaking, they’ve tried to toe-the-line as much as possible. When asked if they were going to be competition to UFC, Tom Atencio (Affliction VP) & Donald Trump said that they weren’t going to compete on that level. It’s a smart move, but the move is quickly neutralized by the fact that Dana White is in Vince McMahon-mode and has somehow convinced everyone that Affliction is UFC’s #1 enemy.

Affliction is stuck in a public relations quandary. They have a big personality in Donald Trump as their front man, but even Trump admitted that the new MMA project is more or less a playtoy to him as opposed to being part of his livelihood. Affliction claims to not be running against UFC. Despite all of this, UFC has convinced the general North American mainstream MMA fan that anyone else in MMA who runs opposite of UFC is a minor-league, secondary promotion. How does Affliction fight off this marketing perception?

Put yourself in the shoes of an average MMA fan in the States. You know that UFC exists and no one else, for the most part. Maybe you know Elite XC exists, or not. You watch ESPN a lot and sometimes Spike TV. You see ads for UFC shows all the time, but maybe would give another MMA group a shot if it was on TV for free and you didn’t have to pay for it. Now, let’s say this person is friends with a really hardcore MMA fan who is hyping up the Affliction show to their best buddy, saying it has the best heavyweights in the world, awesome fights, etc. How do you think the casual fan will react to their hardcore friend’s hard-sell of the Affliction show?

Probably with a shrug of their shoulders.

The challenge for Affliction is not only advertising their show heavily, but getting their advertising in front of the eyeballs of casual fans. No ads with generalities, either. North American MMA fans are a fickle lot and they are not going to emotionally invest a lot of time into a product unless it a) looks like a winner and b) has a long, solid track record.

Can Affliction afford to put on major events with a bloated budget consisting of high-fighter salaries and PPV costs? Furthermore, can they compete without a legitimate television deal? PRIDE thought they could pull it off, but the group only averaged 30-50,000 buys for their Las Vegas events. Without a solid television deal, Affliction is in a very tenuous position.

If there’s one lesson we’ve already learned in the last few years following MMA, it’s that you can lose your ass financially in a hurry. One long-term question for Affliction to answer is whether or not they will be able to survive. The other, more intriguing question, that has yet to be answered is the following:

What exactly constitutes ‘success’ for Affliction? No one is quite sure of the answer yet. I suspect more questions than answers will be raised after the promotion’s debut show on July 19th.