AFTER all these years of marketing Barbie in all her glorious incarnations — and outfits — Mattel is about to gear up to sell a new plastic collectible figure with a different, but still distinctive, look: a 7-foot-tall wrestler named the Big Show.
Mattel will be making toys for World Wrestling Entertainment, the maker of hit shows like “Raw.”
Pro wrestling’s true appeal lies with its soap opera elements, says W.W.E.’s chairman, Vince McMahon.
Mattel, the world’s largest toy manufacturer, is scheduled to announce on Monday a deal to become the new toy partner of World Wrestling Entertainment, the corporate titan of the pro wrestling world and producer of two of the most successful — and longest-running — franchises in television, “Smackdown” and “Raw.”
Starting this week, a new line of toys derived from W.W.E. characters will hit store shelves, a result of two years of development by Mattel. The toys will include action figures of W.W.E. stars like the Big Show and his polar opposite Rey Mysterio (about a foot and a half shorter), as well as roped rings for the figures to wrestle in and toy-size championship belts with special lighting. The deal also includes significant advertising commitments from Mattel in the W.W.E. shows.
If it seems incongruous that a company that depends on selling to children would want to nestle in with wrestling, you may not have been paying close attention to how effectively W.W.E. — which knows a thing or two about many incarnations itself — has reinvented its particular form of entertainment.
But the people at Mattel have been paying attention. Tim Kilpin, the general manager of Mattel Brands, said in a telephone interview, “We’ve always followed the sports and entertainment at W.W.E., and we’ve always admired what they do.”
What they do is put on wrestling shows that are much more about characters and plotlines than they are about matches, wins and pins. But what is new at W.W.E. in recent years is the tone that content has taken. Wrestling, which has been through a rock music phase and an adult-oriented phase, has gone full-blown PG.
“We were always PG on our ‘Smackdown’ show,” said Vince McMahon, the chairman of W.W.E. But the “Raw” show was quietly shifted to meet PG content standards starting about a year ago.
“We’re about the only variety show on television,” Mr. McMahon said, pointing to the roster of guest starts on his shows this season, which has included Jeremy Piven of “Entourage”; the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger; and the Rev. Al Sharpton. “We sell fun,” Mr. McMahon said.
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The fun does involve huge men like the Big Show hurling other huge men around the ring — and sometimes outside of it. But the true appeal, Mr. McMahon said, comes down to “the soap opera elements, the entertainment elements.”
As Mr. McMahon put it, “It’s still about protagonists and antagonists” — or, in the parlance of the genre, “baby faces” and “heels.” (And Mr. McMahon has been both types in the course of acting as his own long-running character, “Mr. McMahon,” on the shows). But it is now done with more twinkle than liniment in the eye.
And it is all in high definition. “HD has made our programs really popular,” Mr. McMahon said.
“It’s about the only 52-week, live, DVR-proof show going,” said Chris McCumber, the executive vice president of marketing for the company’s cable partner, USA Network. The “Raw” show is new every week of the year, and because it is live with sports elements, Mr. McCumber suggested, it is less likely to be recorded on a digital video recorder and played back later — with the commercials skipped.
He said that “Raw” was up 17 percent in total viewers on USA over the last year.
For Mattel, one of the most significant statistics was growth among viewers in the market that it is intensely interested in: children. About 22 percent of the W.W.E. audience is younger than 18, and while Mr. McMahon emphasized that there had been significant growth in the shows among women viewers, what most attracted Mattel was the steady appeal to “the audience we’re trying to reach,” as Mr. Kilpin put it.
As in: boys. Mattel sells toys like Hot Wheels to them and is looking for other products that will appeal to that group.
“We do a lot of research to find out what boys are excited about,” Mr. Kilpin said. Wrestling presented an opportunity to reach “a certain type of boy we didn’t have in our portfolio.” That is a boy, he said, “who loves authentic, athletic performers and is oriented toward entertainment.”
Much work went into devising a new technique that Mr. Kilpin labeled “flex force,” which will allow the new action figures to do moves used by the wrestlers on TV. The company is also paying attention to what Mr. Kilpin calls “the collector market,” which consists of older wrestling fans who collect the figures.
As an added appeal to them, he said, Mattel is making the figures “in a scale that is accurate.” Thus the Big Show’s action figure will tower over Rey Mysterio’s.
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For W.W.E., the deal with Mattel — it is being called a multiyear agreement with no length or dollar amount specified — is another statement of the enduring appeal of wrestling programming. Donna Goldsmith, the chief operating officer of W.W.E., said the company sought proposals from toy companies in 2007, anticipating the conclusion of its deal with Jakks Pacific at the end of 2009.
“Every significant toy company made a bid,” Ms. Goldsmith said. “Mattel just blew us away.” She added, “Mattel just gets us.”
And why not? Wrestling, according to Mr. McMahon anyway, has exactly the right appeal for the home of Barbie. “It’s Americana, basically,” he said.
Article Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/business/media/04adco.html
