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TONY KHAN TALKS AEW POSITIONING AS A BRAND & BACKSTAGE ISSUES

AEW President Tony Khan was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter about a ton of topics. 

On the CM Punk-Elite issues, Khan said:

"The most important thing to me as the CEO is the wrestling fans. I’m a huge wrestling fan, and I try to think like a wrestling fan. I want the best wrestlers here in AEW. I want the best roster. And there may be some of them that don’t get along with each other backstage or on TV. It’s not ideal, but it’s a reality, and I can’t make everyone get along. I’m not sure it’s necessarily even in the best interest of pro wrestling for everybody t get along. But ideally, everybody is going to be able to focus on their matches and putting on the best shows for the fans. And I think that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve had really strong ratings. So even though … wrestlers backstage hate each other and don’t want to be friends with each other, I think we all agree this is a really exciting time for the company. And it’s a really exciting time for the wrestling business and for the wrestling fans.

There are a lot of people around here who think they’re the best. And I think a lot of them have a valid claim that they’re the best. And what I’m trying to do is to create an environment where everybody can go out and prove it multiple times per week and create a platform where the fans can decide who the best wrestlers are, what the best rivalries are, what the best matches are. As long as I can keep the top talent in AEW, we will have the best matches and the best big events. The lineup of wrestlers competing on AEW All In is the strongest group of talent we’ve ever assembled on one show, it features some of the biggest matches in the history of this company, and I think it’s going to be one of the greatest days ever in pro wrestling this Sunday."

On where the company is positioned right now:

"When I first started working with Warner Bros. Discovery, they handed me a big deck of what it is to be a challenger brand. Because this is their expertise, they said: “You’re going to be a challenger brand.” They were totally right. Pepsi is a challenger brand. Pepsi is a huge player in the industry and a major corporation, but nobody would claim that Pepsi is a worldwide leader in the industry. They’re a challenger brand and they’re competing with an established company that’s been around a very long time and they’re taking them on. And they built a huge market share in this space as the challenger brand in that space.

Burger King is another great example of a challenger brand. A lot of their marketing is directed at referring to themselves as that challenger brand and taking on an established leader, and they’re not afraid to call out that leader when they think there’s something that they can do better. There are a lot of examples of these kinds of challenger brands. I think what AEW has established for ourselves is that we’re a challenger brand in a multibillion-dollar business, and we have a large market share carved out for ourselves.

What’s very interesting in the U.K., which is a major media market and one of the best markets for the pro wrestling industry, AEW is carving out a legitimate claim as the industry leader now. It’s very exciting because as a challenger brand, your goal is to go into the different major markets and territories and win them over and try to turn places. If we can go into some major places and take the lead, then that’s really a huge step for us. And right now in the U.K., AEW is the industry leader in pro wrestling: we’ve set the box office records, we have by far the biggest TV audience every week thanks to our partnership with ITV, which has a great history in the wrestling business.  The average person in the U.K. knows ITV is the home of pro wrestling going back many years to World of Sport. And now, AEW, thanks to the great viewership we get on ITV every week, is by far the most-watched wrestling promotion across our shows Dynamite, Rampage, and Collision.

Now that we’re so close to All In at Wembley Stadium, which was, I think, the most ambitious move ever in European pro wrestling, it’s very, very exciting. And it feels like it’s one of the most important events in the history of pro wrestling this Sunday, Aug. 27."

 

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