Campbell McLaren defends early UFC marketing
The Ultimate Fighting Championship was born of the twin desires to showcase Jiu-Jitsu as practiced by the Gracie family in…
The Ultimate Fighting Championship was born of the twin desires to showcase Jiu-Jitsu as practiced by the Gracie family in Brazil, and provide compelling content for Pay Per View television. The initial marketing of the event as a spectacle rather than a sport has in hindsight been widely pilloried. However, in an interesting article by Kevin Iole, the executive producer of the first UFC event, Campbell McLaren, offers a defense, and says the over the top marketing he did then was necessary to get to where we are today.
And so, came such marketing slogans as “Two men enter. One man leaves,” “Banned in 49 states,” and “There are no rules,” none of which was true.
“I was hoping to lure Jerry Falwell to come after us, and I could have taken Jerry Falwell,” McLaren said. “But Sen. John McCain? Oh, boy. War hero, POW, member of some of the Senate’s most powerful committees. That’s not exactly who I wanted. That was too tough a fight.”
As he was pitching UFC 2, he was interviewed by the respected television sportswriter, Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. Sandomir led his story with a quote from McLaren: “I don’t want anyone to die. It may be good for the buy rate. But I don’t want anyone to die.”
Later, Sandomir wrote, “The Ultimate Fighting Championship pits 16 martial arts experts in areas from jujitsu and kung fu to wing chun and pentcak silat in a one-night tournament without rules, gloves, rounds, break or timeouts, where punches, kicks, elbows, and chokes are encouraged, and winners are decided by surrender, a doctor’s diagnosis or death.”
Most promoters would have been outraged by such a story, particularly one in a powerful newspaper such as The New York Times. McLaren, though, was tickled. It was advertising he could not buy at any price.
“If I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting ready to celebrate the 20th anniversary,” McLaren said. “The UFC back then had no marketing budget. Even at that time, there was a lot of stuff on and a lot of choices for people to get their entertainment. If I had not gone to that extent, and hadn’t done the New York Times piece, ‘Death is Cheap: Maybe It’s Just $14.95,’ I don’t think we’d have gotten off the ground.”
McLaren was out of the business by 1997, but along the way, he created a vast awareness of the nascent sport, and hired two key pieces of the effort in Joe Rogan and Joe Silva, cumulatively leaving a legacy of influence on mixed martial arts that very few can match.