The Big Interview – Marshall Zelaznik

The Ultimate Fighting Championship is ever increasing its global audience, as it looks to expand its grasp on the 18-34 year old market in the UK, Sportindustry.biz speaks exclusively to Marshall Zelaznik, Managing Director of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s International Development, to see the UFC’s plans to expand globally.

First of all what is UFC?

UFC is actually sports promotion or sports organisation that stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship and we are associated with mixed martial arts. It’s always important to stress that the term Ultimate Fighting is actually a brand of ours.

So basically we put on mixed martial arts events and they are distributed around the world via television and to a live audience.

?The UFC has a huge following in America but how are you looking to expand the sport globally?

??Well it might surprise you to know that we have a very successful international business currently, so we are in about 140 different countries and territories right now with television – reaching around 400 million homes around the world.??

As part of our growth we are now starting to emphasise our concentration all aspects of business, so aside from putting on fights and producing television shows we also have our merchandising business, the digital distribution business all associated around our contents.

??Our international drive has been to localise all of our content for individual markets and to start developing these additional businesses around our fighting content.??

Are you tailoring your marketing initiatives for certain audiences? For example what are your plans for Great Britain at the moment?

??In England and most of the 140 countries the UFC is promoted very consistently. Because we are the Coca-Cola of the brand when people think of the sport they think of us so we try to promote and position our product in the same way anywhere in the world.??

What we are really effectively doing is putting the right voice with it so it speaks in the proper language locally. We speak to broadcasters and licensees that market just like any other product – so what you see in the UK is very similar to the product you will see in the US.

We just came off a very successful event at The O2 Arena and that night actually had a number of British fighters in it so the promotion of that event focused a lot on the localized talent and local heroes.

So we tweak it a little bit but we always try to stay true to the brand.??

How often do you bring UFC to England and will you up the amount of times a year that you come here?

So we have held events at The O2 Arena, MEN Arena in Manchester, Belfast and Newcastle, so we have effectively been doing around 2 every 12 months.

We want to do more, we expect to do more and right now we are working on bringing 4 to 6 events to the UK and Europe so that we have live events in the proper time zone for the market.

We know from our ticket sales and our web traffic and our merchandise sales that there is an appetite for more UFC events here so we are trying to figure out how to deliver those.

??How successful is the UFC here in England, how many people went to the recent event at The O2 Arena?

It was something like 17,400 – a total sell-out, every seat was taken just as it was in the MEN Arena so we are used to selling out events. I think at the O2 we generated £1.6m ticket revenue from that one event.

We actually have the highest ticket value in sport, a lot of people may be surprised at that. Our average ticket price in London was something like £110 and in the US its $245 – so the ticket revenue we generate at events is very large and we consistently break revenue records at arenas.??

The UFC faces a problem because it doesn’t have a licence to actually compete in certain countries, how does this hinder your progression globally?

Well there are instances in some parts of the world where there is a prohibition and that is something that we are prepared to combat.

In fact I just got back from Germany and we are always in discussions with politicians and the media to give them as much information as we can regarding the sport – it is part of our business plan and we do plan to address these situations.

But to be honest it doesn’t really slow us down. ??The thing I should probably stress is the reason we spend so much money and time negotiating with politicians and all is because we are the brand leader – we have to act like the brand leader which means creating awareness and an understanding of the sport.

??How has the UFC expanded its fan base by such a large percentage in recent years?

We know our demographic is 18-34 year old men, and what we believe is happening through the research we do is that, not is that fan base getting deeper but we are seeing more and more people graduate from WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) once they realise its just entertainment and its not real – they want to see real fighting.??

So our fan base is getting bigger and bigger around the world, and we are very successful in that demographic of 18-34 year olds, which everyone is trying to reach, in fact we are one of the most popular sports in the world among that demographic.

You will find that in England there are more people watching UFC than any of the boxing matches out there. I think what we are seeing is that more fans are coming in every day – we just did an event in the Philippines and one of our fighters couldn’t even leave his hotel because people were mobbing the lobby – so our fighters are becoming worldwide stars.

?How are you looking to expand the UFC into new markets?

There is now a lifestyle that has been built around the sport – its very aspirational, it may surprise you to hear those two words together!

Fans dress a certain way, they listen to certain types of music, they train a certain way, so we are developing our clothing merchandise in a way that exemplifies the UFC brand.

We are also developing UFC gyms for people to train in – these aren’t for professionals but for everyone to come along and get fit.

We have two of those open in the US and we are looking to bring them to the UK soon. ??Anything that you can imagine that is associated with merchandising we are looking at – including UFC equipment.

Finally, with two guys beating the living daylights out of each other on a constant basis, is this sport really safe?

Yes, I mean statistically it is. There are two medical studies that have been published that have concluded that mixed martial arts is much safer than boxing – the reality is that there has never been a death or serious injury in the UFC and boxing has an average of 8 deaths a year.

In mixed martial arts you can win a fight without ever striking your opponent in the head. The other reason is the way they train – they don’t spar all day – they practice grappling and cardiovascular strength.?