10 Times WWE Marketing Was Pure BULLSH*T
Spinning you right round since 1982.
On a Monday Night RAWWWWW screened just before WrestleMania 35, Stephanie McMahon unleashed her latest marketing campaign, of the sort that has absolutely ruined any sense of spontaneity on WWE television.
WWE needed one more element to put over the first time ever! Women's WrestleMania event. We had the sympathetic, injured babyface. We had the marketable, progressive history component. We had the worked shoot element. The synergistic social media #engagement. Brawls. Beat-downs. Suspensions, plural. Injuries, plural. Authority intervention. And, finally but not finally, vehicular assaults slash arrests slash police stuff.
But what else?
"Nothing?" a faint voice called out in the distance.
"Everything, gotcha," shrieked Steph, and so the marketing machine plastered the mandatory tagline across the match, which doubled as a cautionary tale: never again petition for nor entrust WWE to craft a long-term storyline six months in the making. The company will simply weld every single storytelling trope onto it - and how Stephanie McMahon wasn't the Special Guest Referee is beyond comprehension.
WINNER TAKES ALL was WWE's latest marketing assault. That, and 'We're All Superstars!' from the Fox SmackDown ad campaign. The dude in the deli, yes, but not Aleister Black, Ali, or 96% of the full-time roster...
10. Once In A Lifetime
The worst thing about the electric if baggy Once In A Lifetime - beyond of course the ten minutes in the middle wherein the Rock did little but wheeze - is that it was actually viable.
It felt like a moment in time that could only happen at that time.
John Cena entered the match, deep into the Super years, at his most formidable. The Rock entered the Sun Life Stadium on excursion from Hollywood looking even bigger, in aura and physique, than he had throughout the Attitude Era. The years that separated each charismatic talisman had felt like a lifetime; Cena represented and was synonymous with the PG Era's slick, anodyne aesthetic, whereas Rock starred on RAW when RAW was still raw.
It was a true dream match precisely because it was so unreal. The Rock was never coming back, we thought. He was either too above or too busy for such a landmark match, one promoted before the part-timer era entered full ascendency. 'Once In A Lifetime' felt so wonderfully, plausibly true that a record number of pay-per-view customers purchased WrestleMania XXVIII. And then WWE simply promoted a rematch the next year.
Really, it's our fault for trusting them.
When the Velveteen Dream agonises in a minute-long Baron Corbin chinlock on the TLC undercard, we will have nobody to blame but ourselves.