Eric Bischoff On If Vince McMahon Is Out Of Touch
Eric Bischoff recently joined the latest episode of 83 Weeks, where he discussed a wide variety of topics, including whether or not he believed Vince McMahon was out of touch. According to Bischoff, it’s easy for others to say that, but things are much more complex.
“They’ve spent 20 years developing the product and the platform they have that appeals to advertisers. It’s taken them 20 years to get there, or more, and now that they have it, they have to treat it with respect and they have to treat it very carefully and there are things I’m sure the WWE would love to do creatively that they just can’t because they know the blow back they’ll get from advertisers,” he said (transcription via Andrew Thompson of POST Wrestling).
Bischoff went on to liken McMahon’s job to producing movies for a company like Disney. “It’s a little bit like producing an action movie for Disney. You gotta be really careful how you do that. That’s probably the best analogy I can give, and does that mean that he’s out of touch or does that mean he’s catering his business to his customer? The real customer, being the advertiser, because without the advertiser, there are no viewers folks.”
Finally, Bischoff touched on the general opinion of the viewers, explaining that making sure to not upset various advertising opportunities also plays a role in things. “I know the viewers like to think they’re the most important thing in the world and in some respects they are, because it’s a direct connection to the advertising opportunity, but if the advertising community says, ‘Aht, Aht. I know there’s a lot of people watching your show, but we just can’t have our product associated with it,’ you’re dead. You’re done, and guess what? All those viewers who were so important, aren’t gonna be watching the product because they can’t live without advertising. So it’s easy to say so and so is out of touch, if you don’t understand the complexity of the business as a whole and just how significant those broadcast rights are and those broadcast rights will not exist without a really, really solid relationship and a confidence level amongst advertisers.”
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