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| Pictured: Daniel Bryan's spirit animal Screen Grab Via UPROXX |
The movie wasn't much different than any other offering; from what I have heard (I didn't see it yet), the computer animation was cheesy, they relied on washed-up names from yesteryear as the star power, and the writing made Dan Brown look like Shakespeare and Shakespeare look like incomprehensibly deep alien literature that the human mind could never behold due to its relatively weak computing power. The trusty ol' Nielsen ratings for the first viewing came in at 0.4, and you all know how much I love to judge by ratings.
Yet, Sharknado had pretty much become a cultural event with deafeningly loud social buzz. The alternative media was all over it. Powerful online entities such as UPROXX/Warming Glow, Gawker/Jezebel, Grantland, and SB Nation all had Sharknado coverage, among other places that I frequent. Outside of my bubble, well, the movie created such a groundswell of discussion and joke-peddling that it received mainstream coverage on national news and talk shows.
What does this have to do with wrestling? Well, specifically, it points to WWE's roundly mocked social media strategy as almost validation or even vindication for it. Critics of WWE's push behind platforms such as Twitter and Tout have mocked that initiative while pointing at decreasing ratings. As if the intense scrutiny surrounding ratings isn't enough to drive me crazy in 2013 alone, the mocking of a strategy that is meant to spur discussion and participation in the programming feels almost haughty in a sense.
Oh, you want to be a part of the show? Who cares, because old people who fall asleep with their televisions on are not doing it to wrestling and instead are watching bullshit procedurals. Nevermind that if you're that in tuned to what the company is providing that you're showing more of an interest in the show than someone who watches a show out of habit, and thus are logically more likely to buy from advertisers. No, it's ratings that dominate, right?
That's where WWE's strategy, which despite "flagging" ratings has led to stabilized pay-per-view buys, increased merchandise sales, record WrestleMania weekends, and overall satisfactory profits, ties together with Sharknado. Sure, the movie got 0.4 in the ratings. On the surface, that's a bad number. That being said, the social media buzz generated was such that it gave the movie free advertisement, whether on blogs, Twitter, or other television outlets. That will surely increase the rerun value of it when it certainly gets played a fuckload of more times on the network, or when DVR numbers get factored in, or even in home video sales/Netflix rentals. Because that response was so gigantic, it's getting a sequel. If that doesn't speak to the general worthlessness of using ratings and ratings alone as a barometer for success in media, then I don't know what is.
That's also why WWE has pushed and will continue to push social media as a means of success along with "traditional" metrics. Ratings by themselves may be worthless, but when they're a part of a total fabric of interwoven threads, they tell part of the story. Sure, WWE itself needs to cool it on their alleged overreactions to ratings. That being said, how much of it is sources fucking with dirt sheet writers by playing into their general stoic attitudes concerning raw show numbers?
I mean, we were supposed to be aghast at the fact that Daniel Bryan drew "bad" ratings for his big win over Randy Orton, yet, here we are, going into SummerSlam, and guess who's challenging John Cena for the WWE Championship for the second or third biggest pay-per-view event of the year? Daniel Bryan. Why is that the case if he can't "draw" ratings? Could it be WWE can't keep his shirts on the shelves? Could it be that no matter what arena he steps into, he gets a bonkers reaction? Could it be that maybe those ratings were skewed because of people watching Chicago clinch the Stanley Cup against the Boston Bruins, and that maybe there were better DVR numbers? Or maybe Bryan is one of the most socially active topics on Twitter? Could it be that despite all that, WWE has seen that Bryan is a bona fide star taking in all the metrics, much in the same way the people who made and aired Sharknado recognize that a 0.4 rating in an age where there are a billion channels and a billion things to watch doesn't tell the entire fucking story?
WWE jumped on Twitter for a reason. They partnered Tout, and they didn't fail because people didn't like to make short-burst videos. If anything, they were ahead of the curve in that department. Television is changing. To stay stuck in the past and looking at nearsighted, increasingly antiquated metrics like ratings as a sole decider in whether TV was successful, is to become increasingly irrelevant. Sometimes, you just have to let go of the notion that just because most of the people aren't watching what you're watching that something isn't good or shouldn't happen. Instead, maybe you should party with the people who ARE talking about stuff that's cool in a constructive way. Much like with Sharknado, when you do that with wrestling, you may get a far better experience out of the whole thing and actually help keep it around in a similar state of fun for years to come.
