It feels like only yes­ter­day when I watched my first MMA event - which hap­pened to be the orig­i­nal UFC Super Fight. After watch­ing, I real­ized that this sport could only be on PPV due to the sheer amount of vio­lence it pre­sented. Since those days, the UFC obvi­ously has come a long way — not only in terms of fights but also in allow­ing MMA to tran­scend the moniker of a “bar­baric” sport­ing event. While the sport has numer­ous orga­ni­za­tions and tons great fight­ers, the suc­cess of sport has always hinged on fans and it cross­ing over into the main­stream. The UFC slowly started get­ting real spon­sors like Harley David­son, Burger King and a host of oth­ers. MMA was slowly gain­ing accep­tance and com­pa­nies were embrac­ing the pro­mo­tion the sport got their prod­ucts. Com­pa­nies like BSN, which aren’t usu­ally widely heard of, are a per­fect exam­ple of MMA help­ing them become known in main­stream media. Now when I enter a GNC and see a Syntha-6 bot­tle it has a lit­tle UFC logo next to it. It is things like this that help move the sport forward.

Nowa­days, you open a mag­a­zine and you see MMA fight­ers (both male and female) endors­ing prod­ucts. Whether it’s t-shirts, sup­ple­ments or apparel, Mixed Mar­tial Arts has become a viable mar­ket­ing machine that cap­tures the key demo­graph­ics for a lot of prod­ucts across the board.

Let’s not for­get that MMA is now seen on broad­cast TV, thanks in part to the now defunct Eli­teXC, as well as Strike­Force, which broad­casts on CBS. In addi­tion to that, com­pa­nies like Fat­head are now acknowl­edg­ing MMA fight­ers as “main­stream” ath­letes with “main­stream” appeal. You can now hear names like GSP, Fedor, Gina Carano, Chuck Lid­dell and many oth­ers men­tioned in the same sen­tences as ath­letes like Michael Phelps, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade. This shows that com­bat sports other than box­ing have now assim­i­lated them­selves into today’s sports cov­er­age and beyond. 

Here are just a few exam­ples of how MMA is now part of main­stream media.

(con­tinue reading…)