TNA Crosses the Line

Earlier this week, TNA Wrestling officially announced their "Cross the Line" marketing campaign. This campaign has resulted in a new logo and slogan for the company and will be supported by a multi-layer advertising and marketing campaign including electronic and print placements and a variety of interactive initiatives. The goal of “Cross The Line” is to encourage fans who have never watched TNA to try it and to get current TNA fans to recruit others.

What Does All This Mean?
Throughout the history of wrestling, promotions have changed their logos and slogans for a variety of reasons. In some cases they were a way to emphasize a change in the product (WWE Attitude) and sometimes they were just cosmetic (WCW changing their logo). In this case, it appears that TNA is serious about growing the company.

From a personal standpoint, TNA has done two things since launching this promotion that they previously refused to do with this site. I received a press release from the company and I have been given some promotional photos from the company. While that may not seem like much, it is a major step forward from the time one of their people told me that they would prefer that they not be covered by this site.

I always found the stance they took with this site to be very foolish. While I can't give specific stats about this site, I can say that the WWE has realized the benefit of working with this site and were able to garner front-page post-WrestleMania XXIV coverage for an entire week on the front page About.com, a site that gets 53 million visitors a month. While most of the people looking at the homepage don't know a wristlock from a wristwatch, they knew that something big happened in wrestling and maybe a few of them got interested enough to start watching.

While on the topic of stats, I have a unique read on the battle between these companies from my website. Overall, this site skews towards the casual fan of wrestling. Until about a year-and-a-half ago, I used to give equal time to every televised wrestling program and noticed that the clicks for the TNA articles were ludicrously low. Since then, I have pretty much ignored TNA coverage on this site. Amazingly, after many millions of clicks, I have yet to receive a single email complaining about my lack of TNA coverage.

Now you are probably getting curious about just how far apart the WWE and TNA are in clicks on this site. The following is a great and fair example. Every month, I write over the same articles for both my TNA and WWE previews. Both articles get roughly the same promotion from me by being put up in the essentials box two weeks before each event. If you Google the phrases backlash preview and sacrifice preview, you will see that this site ranks number one. While, I can't give exact numbers of the difference between clicks I can give you a shocking statistic. From January 2008 thru March 2008, the difference between my WWE PPV Preview and my TNA PPV Preview is over 17 times greater for the WWE.

These stats speak volumes about the potential growth for TNA if they decide to go after the casual fans. Hopefully for them, this new marketing program will help them close the gap against the WWE.

_{Photo: © 2008 TNA Entertainment LLC.}