Month: January 2018

WWE has a legacy TV business and a growing subscription streaming app — and it’s a giant on YouTube, Facebook and other social platforms. But as the company plans to do more scripted and unscripted programming for TV, streaming video and social platforms, it’s putting many its video teams in one place to do so.

For instance, WWE premiered a new live show on Facebook Watch on Jan. 16 called the “Mixed Match Challenge,” which features WWE stars competing in a tag-team tournament for charities. Each episode of the 12-episode series will run for 20 to 30 minutes and will feature additional short-form content meant to hype different matches and episodes to WWE’s Facebook audience. The first episode had about 126,000 live viewers and has generated 1.2 million views in less than 24 hours.

Facebook is looking for original shows that can have social and interactive elements beyond the core episodes. With WWE’s talent and avid fan base, the company can create community-centric programming, said Michelle Wilson, chief revenue and marketing officer for WWE. The company will use its talent’s social pages to promote the show, and let fans vote on the final competitors from its Raw and SmackDown brands.

“I’ve sat in all of the meetings as we’ve been developing this show, and we’ve continued to say that we cannot think about this as a regular TV show,” Wilson said. “Our writers are sitting in the same room with our TV, digital and social teams to figure out how to do it. It’s a different approach that’s true to the Facebook platform and our fans on Facebook.”

Last year, WWE purchased another office space at its Stamford, Connecticut, headquarters and produced 1,500 hours of original programming, including 600 hours of short-form digital video. As the company expands its video production business this year, WWE wants its long-form producers and editors to sit beside its short-form producers and editors. Overall, WWE has about 350 employees within its TV and digital media divisions.

As part of WWE’s video expansion plans, the company’s Los Angeles-based WWE Studios unit, which previously focused on theatrical and home-entertainment releases, is now actively developing and pitching show ideas to TV and digital buyers. WWE has some experience on this front, with shows such as “Total Divas” on E! and a Ric Flair documentary for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.

“Up until now, an opportunity such as ‘Divas’ or the Ric Flair documentary would come along, and we’d flip it,” said George Barrios, chief strategy and financial officer for WWE. “We are now ready to go from opportunistic to aggressive; this is now a strategic imperative, whether it’s TV, Netflix, Amazon or even YouTube Red.”

The WWE executives said they’re able to become aggressive in part due to the success the company has found building an audience on digital and social platforms.

WWE’s subscription streaming service, WWE Network, had 1.51 million paying members as of September 2017 and is bringing in twice the revenue of its legacy pay-per-view business, the company said.

On external platforms, WWE also looms large: On YouTube, WWE’s main channel has 21 million subscribers and 19.5 billion lifetime views, making it the second-most viewed YouTube channel of all time. On Facebook, WWE’s main page has 37.8 million followers. WWE stars, too, have large followings on this platform. John Cena’s Facebook page, for instance, has more than 45 million likes; YouTube channels such as The Bella Twins and the gaming-focused UpUpDownDown each have over a million subscribers.

Overall, WWE said it surpassed 20 billion views across digital and social platforms last year.

This reach comes in handy when WWE goes to market with different series projects, Wilson said. “We do our brand presentation, which hits on [WWE’s digital and social numbers], and then we pitch a show concept,” she said. “We’re able to remind them that when they’re deciding on a show, we can bring in a huge social audience.”

Image provided by WWE

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With weeks to go before the shows begin, New York Fashion Week has taken yet another hit.

Alexander Wang announced Wednesday that he will shift his runway calendar to show collections in June and December, and split those collections into a monthly delivery schedule.

In doing so, he’s the latest to join the many designers and brands that have fled the traditional New York fashion calendar in favor of business strategies that better suit a changing industry. Wang’s become known for his New York Fashion Week parties and press spectacles: In September, a brigade of models streamed off of a bus and onto a runway that was staged on a closed Brooklyn road. Musical performances and high-profile celebrity appearances followed during the after party. The whole to-do was dubbed “#WangFest.

With Wang’s departure adding to the the steady stream of designers who have already departed the schedule, NYFW feels in danger of losing a considerable amount of steam. Over the course of several fashion seasons, designers looking for a better fit have tried on a variety of different strategies: Rodarte, Proenza Schouler and Altuzarra all fled to show during Paris Fashion Week, rather than New York. Rachel Zoe, Tommy Hilfiger and Tom Ford tried out Los Angeles. Thakoon went direct-to-consumer, and Rag & Bone and Mara Hoffman ditched the runway altogether.

All this see-what-sticks schedule shifting is indicative of the industry’s ongoing sea change: Customers are in charge, and the traditional fashion calendar, which prioritized wholesale relationships, is out of sync with their behavior. So the designers — more in charge of their own decisions, sales and destinies, thanks to digital and direct relationships with customers — are bucking norms and setting out on a path to debut new collections on their own schedules.

As designers look to make a more lasting impression on the runway with potential and existing customers, the confines, and the noise, of New York Fashion Week feel counterintuitive.

“We decided not to have a show after much back and forth, which I’m sure a lot of other designers are having right now, because it’s not the same clear path it was four or five years ago. Then, it was just what you do; you show at fashion week,” said Hoffman. “Now, it’s so jam-packed, and everyone is trying to have a voice at the same time. How do you stand out in that moment?”

Hoffman said the decision to nix the runway show altogether stemmed from one primary reason: It had become a time, money and energy suck that was all for show, not sales. Hoffman had to design pieces she knew would never sell, just so they would look exciting on the runway, which distracted her attention from her brand’s bread and butter: what the customers would actually end up buying.

As NYFW designers re-evaluate strategies, calendar shifts and monthly deliveries like Wang’s are taking over, in place of the see-now-buy-now movement, which was propped up as the next evolution of the fashion calendar. Wang said in a previous interview that, while the model was appealing, his company didn’t have the bandwidth to drastically overhaul its manufacturing and production schedule. Tying sales to a runway show that’s just a “blip” on a crowded calendar, as Hoffman puts it, is also a risky move.

“There have been so many changes to NYFW over the last few years, and everyone is focusing on their marketing efforts, to decide what works best for their business, as well as what enables them to serve their customer best,” said Rebecca Taylor, who stopped hosting a traditional fashion show in 2015. In its place, she hosts one-on-one guided showrooms with the press and buyers. “This has allowed me to take advantage of the moment and communicate the collection in a meaningful way.”

This season, Taylor will invite customers back into the fold by adding a consumer viewing for fans of the brand who want a sneak peek of what’s to come and to pre-order collection items. The production schedule itself hasn’t changed.

As fashion shows center more and more around the customer, brands that sell directly to consumers have figured out ways to work around the out-of-season fashion week model. Designer Misha Nonoo — who has hosted “shows” on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, with items immediately available for purchase — said the glaring lag time between the time of a traditional fashion show and when it hits stores turned her off for good.

“If designers are increasingly opting out of the traditional wholesale model in favor of direct-to-consumer strategies, is Fashion Week now entirely redundant? The biggest problem is that we are serving the fashion industry, not the customer,” said Nonoo. “As a relatively early adopter of a direct-to-consumer model, I found myself searching for ways in which to minimize end-of-season waste. It seemed bizarre that clothing on shop floors was often out of sync with real-life seasons due to the traditional retail calendar.”

Nonoo has been testing on-demand manufacturing, a model that NYFW organizer the CFDA has recently adopted for designers, in partnership with production platform Nineteenth Amendment. The technology, which only launches the manufacturing cycle when an item is ordered, could land itself a starring role within New York Fashion Week, if designers continue to rethink the need for a traditional runway show.

For its part, the CFDA has tried to position itself as a resource for brands and designers who participate in New York Fashion Week. But that doesn’t change the fact that these designers are questioning the need for a show.

“I think there is more opportunity than ever for designers to reveal new product in non-traditional ways, according to their own schedule,” said Chriz Benz, the creative director at Bill Blass. “In some ways, the idea of a fashion show feels more European and traditional, anyway – perhaps a reason why those more reliant on this format have decamped abroad.”

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