He's never brought a dime to the company and he's never made a dime, yet here he is sitting on the front of my poster.
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"I see a guy who has his last gate was $1.7 million and he fought on free TV. I look up at that poster and I see myself tucked in the back there," McGregor said at the pre-fight press conference. "Where is my damn belt? This is a super fight. The team turned on the television to check out McGregor's now infamous tirade. Hunter says his team was working on a pitch for UFC 200 into the wee hours of the morning back in February when one his guys came into the conference room and asked if anyone had seen Conor McGregor's blow up at a press conference over a press briefing poster for UFC 196 (which was not created by PETROL). Not UFC, and you see that in the press conferences."Īnd that was PETROL's inspiration for the UFC 200 campaign. "Some leagues have a stringent set of rules and a way that people are allowed to speak and what they're allowed to talk about. Hunter says the most brilliant thing UFC does is that they build the excitement around the personalities by not controlling them. Beyond soccer, there's no other property that has to do that." UFC has to get people excited 365 days a year. "With UFC, we get right to the core of emotional marketing. We want to hit them on five or six different touchpoints. "When we're working on a launch like Call of Duty, we're building up for six months to get people to invest $60-100 for a product. Hunter says there's a huge difference between working on UFC materials and other properties they represent, such as popular video games like Call of Duty.
But, you didn't want to step on the toes of the pay-per-view fights either." "When UFC made the Fox deal, you could see a visual shift because those fights were promoted differently than the pay-per-views. "The NFL doesn't always build around the players, it's about the league. Lorenzo and Dana always had in their heads that they wanted to get to the level of the NFL in terms of awareness," said Hunter.
"The first Fox imagery was really about building awareness. Then Fox came into the picture, and the branding needed to shift to account for that monumental shift in UFC's business. Hunter and his team were right there, continuing to evolve the posters to reflect the increasingly global brand of the UFC. It was a big departure for UFC."įrom there, UFC truly went global, hosting events in places like Japan and Brazil. "This was about building up emotion around real characters and stylizing apparel in a whole new way. "WWE does a great job of building up fictional characters," said Hunter. Fertitta and the rest of the UFC team loved the idea, and it became one of the catalysts for new apparel options to be launched at UFC 94.