10 Most Shameless WWE Promotional Tactics
Dark Side Of The Ring, as seen on the WWE Network on Peacock!
It's a hard list to cut down to just 10, this one.
There's no such thing as a "nice company" regardless of how heavily the corporate world invests in chief brand officers and their ilk, but WWE are fundamentally not a particularly nice company.
Even if you've never read a headline about their business practices in your life, the tone that permeates throughout the television product should make it clear - nobody has friends, nobody can be friends, and nobody gets rewarded for even entertaining the idea of friendship as a concept. The nicest thing anybody ever really says about WWE now is that it's been around ages and not gone away, which is the way people describe their problematic elderly relatives. Who, ironically, make up the company's best demographic.
The fact that it's been part of the pop culture landscape so long is remarkable and somewhat admirable, and allows for a Network full of carefully curated legitimately amazing matches and moments to get endless play forever and ever while the really awful stuff gets buried away and/or completely removed from the Peacock version of the service.
Or, spoken about in lists such as this...
10. Hawk Falls Off The Wagon, The TitanTron And The Map
What was it about 1998 and promoters having fun with the addictions of others?
Millions of people were tuning in to both Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro as 90s business collectively boomed, and they were rewarded with both Michael 'Hawk' Hegstrand and Scott Hall's very real personal problems being cheaply exploited for sh*t midcard angles.
Top star Stone Cold Steve Austin drank a billion beers a week, but this was a cake-and-eat-it era for the rampaging organisation. Hawk‘s boozing wasn’t to be celebrated but judged and castigated.
Stumbling over during entrances, being too intoxicated to realise Animal needed to make tags, and slurring his words on commentary, the disparate portrayal of the former tag team icon was too mean-spirited to be entertaining, and never once promoted the tag team nor sell a big pay-per-view or TV match.
Droz shoving a suicidal Hawk off the TitanTron structure to imply he was his 'pusher' was the inciting incident, with the former 'Puke' enabling Hawk's problems to steal his spot in the team. Midcard fluff mining the worst of humanity, all for payoffs that never came.