TNA Cross The Line Podcast retweetledi
Kevin Kay, the former President of Spike TV, discusses @ThisIsTNA's rebrand to 'Impact Wrestling' in 2011.
Taken from a special section of the new @Audible and Apple Books release, BEYOND NITRO: Untold Stories from the WCW era by @GuyEvansBooks:
"...There’s also programming people who will tell you,” says Kay, “back in the day when TV listings mattered…that when you changed the name of a show in TV Guide, nobody was going to find it. So there was a lot of argument about that: ‘If we change the name of the show on the DirecTV guide – and now it’s Impact Wrestling – they won’t know what that is.’ There was a lot of debate about it.
“So was it worth it to do it? I think we had gotten into a place culturally where TNA had started to sound like it wasn’t the right name. We’d gotten some of that feedback, and also from a sponsorship point of view, which is [important]...
...When you make those decisions, it costs a lot of money…and [in this case], it didn’t move anything. We told the viewers, ‘It’s Impact Wrestling now!’ but it was like, ‘Okay, well…now we’ve confused the audience again.’
“It was probably a bad idea. As I talk about it, I realize it was an even worse idea than I thought at the time! But again, we made those decisions for reasons that made sense at the time. Some of them worked out and some of them didn’t. Listen – bringing in Hulk was terrific for a while…then it sort of fizzled out. It didn’t work.”
Listen on Audible for more:
USA: audible.com/pd/B0GT6C2N3H/…
UK: audible.co.uk/pd/B0GT68FGDP/…
Canada: audible.ca/pd/B0GT6YW6BC/…
Australia: audible.com.au/pd/B0GT72S26X/…
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Apple Books link: books.apple.com/us/audiobook/b…
Direct Audible link: audible.com/pd/B0GT6C2N3H/…
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