TNA star Bully Ray was a guest on the Talk Is Jericho podcast, where he talked about his transition from WWE to TNA and what he perceives to be TNA’s weakness. Below is an excerpt:
Leaving WWE and coming to TNA: “It was cool (going from WWE to TNA). I’ve truly enjoyed everything I have done in the wrestling business so I don’t look at it as I came from a small place, I went to a bigger place, and now I’m going back to a smaller place. I’ve enjoyed every challenge that was thrown at me. TNA is still a growing company, and they’ve had a lot of big names come through their door. Hulk Hogan, Kurt Angle, Jeff Hardy, Sting… I could go on and on about all of the big names that have come through there. Nine years later, I still enjoy being there, but my frustration lies in the fact that the company has not grown at the rate where I think it should be growing.
TNA’s biggest problem and a possible solution:“I’m not trying to sound like a douche, but a lot of people have said that a guy like me, who has come up on the pole with Vince McMahon and stuff like that, should be helping out. I try to help out as much as possible, but they have their vision and they do what they want to do. I think TNA’s number one problem, forget about the product because there’s a lot of great wrestlers there – it’s product awareness. You can build the better mousetrap, but if nobody knows that you’ve built it, nobody is going to buy it. We need to get our name out there more, we need to knock on more doors, and we need to get more commercials out there.
“The number one thing that I told TNA to do was to go fish in WWE’s pool. If it was up to me, I would saturate Monday Night Raw with TNA commercials so that people were forced to open their eyes and go ‘Hey, what the hell is this?’ If it was up to me, I would create a nice, big, shiny infomercial. Let’s take something like the George Foreman Grill or the P90X. How did those products become so popular? Where did they start? Infomercials at three-in-the-morning! Then once they caught on, the mainstream marketing and advertising went through.
“So I presented an idea to TNA: let’s put together a nice, big, shiny infomercial. Here’s Hulk Hogan, here’s Kurt Angle, here’s Sting, here’s Jeff Hardy, here’s all the names that you know and love that are very recognizable. Here’s what TNA is, here’s what we do, here’s why we are different, and here’s where you can find us every Thursday night. And since we’re on Spike TV, which is a member of Viacom, we can take this infomercial on TNA and we can put it on all of the brother and sister stations of Viacom at two-in-the-morning where the advertising rates would be a little bit cheaper. Let’s bring our product to the masses, and let’s force feed it down their throats just as the George Foreman Grill and the P90X did.”
