The UFC knew ESPN would market the sport heavily to push ESPN+ subscriptions, including for Conor McGregor’s Jan. 18 match.espn images
TV networks typically include minimum marketing guarantees in any rights deal they cut with a league or a conference. These commitments spell out exactly how much the networks should promote a given league or conference — and where those promotions should run.
In 2018, though, when the UFC negotiated its deal with ESPN, UFC executives did not ask for any minimum marketing commitments.
I’ll let Endeavor president Mark Shapiro explain. Endeavor bought the UFC in 2016.
“This is something that I learned from [former NBA Commissioner] David Stern. We were fighting in the negotiation room about how much marketing we should get, and I just remembered that when I was with ESPN and we first got the NBA in 2002, I was having the same kind of arguments with Adam Silver at the negotiating table. At one point, David interrupted and said, ‘Forget it. We’ll take something else. We don’t need a minimum marketing commitment from ESPN.’ I thought that was a huge win for us, and I didn’t know if he was going to hit me with anything bigger. He said, ‘For what you guys are paying, you’re going to have no choice but to market my brand and my teams more than anything else on your network.’ And he was right.
“I recalled that when we were negotiating this time on the other side of the table with ESPN. I said, ‘We don’t need one. Your whole goal is to drive ESPN+ subs, and you’re going to have to promote ESPN fights as well.’ The prelims are on ESPN. The goal is to get people to watch the prelims on ESPN and then use ESPN as a barker channel or a megaphone to promote ESPN+. We dropped the ask. So far, we have collectively managed it to perfection.”
Shapiro said the numbers prove that his strategy is correct — so much so that he said he has received several calls from friends in the business wondering what UFC had to give up in the negotiations in order to secure so much marketing from ESPN.
The Jan. 18 UFC pay-per-view card that featured Conor McGregor against Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone resulted in 1 million PPV purchases and 500,000 new subscribers. Shapiro said ESPN+ sold 50,000 pay-per-views in one minute.
“It’s the UFC that is driving sign-ups by every metric we look at,” Shapiro said. “It’s not even close. There are a lot of nice-to-have [properties] on the platform. But UFC is appointment viewing.”
