More Videos
- Time Lapse World Series Is A Great Play
- Boise State Stock Plan: An Early Success
- Dollar Signs Seen In Young "Buck" Jennings
- Iverson Wasn't A Popular "Answer"
- My Top 10 Marketing Ideas For Winless Nets
- Airlines Add 'Super Bowl' Tax
- Chicken Wing Finder Makes Debut
- Michelle Wie Wins, Now What?
- TV Series Inks Unique Deal For Fight
- The Breakdown: LeBron To Change To No. 6?
RSS FEED
SPORTS BIZ VIDEO GALLERY
MOST SHARED
- Analyze This?
- Realty Check: USDA Home Loans
- Health Care Bill Nears Test Vote
- The 'Real' Jobless Rate: 17.5% Of Workers Are Unemployed
- 100% Mortgage Financing From USDA
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: Keeping America Great
- Bove: Expect Goldman To Increase Dividend Meaningfully
- Lightning Round OT: Knight Capital, Ebix and More
- Dems Snare 60 Votes to Move Ahead on Health Care
- How Stock Investors Can Play Holiday Travel
- Time Lapse World Series Is A Great Play
- Hirschhorn: Greed...or Fear
- My Top 10 Tech Toys for the Holidays
- iPhone a Better Gaming Platform Than Android?
- May Day For Dendreon
- 100% Mortgage Financing From USDA
- Holiday Tipping: Who And How Much
- Deep Discounts Should Make It a Very Tech-y Holiday
- The Richest Members of the US Congress
- New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step
- Black Friday Deals May Not Signal Retail Comeback
- Thanksgiving Week Stuffed With Economic News
- UPS Sets New Rates For 2010
- Wall Street Jobs Slow to Return Despite Record Profits
- Investors to Goldman: Be Less Greedy
- Victoria's Secret Hopes to Rekindle Desire for Lingerie
- 'New Moon' Takes Record $72.7M Box Office Bite
Sports Biz
Text Size 
 |
] --and perhaps its partner, NBC–-spent. (NBC's parent company is GE [GE
Loading...
()
] which also owns CNBC.)But when you look a little bit deeper, it's pretty easy to understand. One, there was somehow a student pilot up there. I've heard of student drivers in cars, but not in planes and blimps. Secondly, it was the WWE for god sakes.
Well, just days after announcing they were overhauling their marketing strategy, WWE somehow came up with another idea to get attention in their battle with the likes of mixed martial arts. Fake their chairman's death.
Last Monday, after "Vince McMahon Appreciation Night," he stepped into a limo, which promptly exploded. WWE.com then announced that he was presumed dead since no body was recovered. The organization then went to YouTube and pulled the video, most likely to prevent some sort of video splicing analysis.
I have to admit, I thought it would never work. Maybe you could have done this 15 years ago when the Internet wasn't around, I reasoned, when you couldn't confirm that one major newspaper was reporting his death. But now you can do that. Now you can go to the local paper where the event happened--the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader--and see that despite the limo explosion no emergency vehicles were called, that the blowing up was actually filmed by a pyrotechnics company two days before in the middle of the night and they had permits to conduct the act. And despite the fact that the WWE said the FBI is investigating the accident, the paper also reported that the FBI was never involved.
But I was "dead" wrong. The total page views for June 12, the day after McMahon's "death" were 36.8 million with two million daily unique visitors. Now compare that to the WWE.com three month average of 14.3 million page views and one million unique visitors. Over the past week, there has been so much written about whether McMahon is dead or alive on wrestling message boards, that if you go to Google [GOOG
Loading...
()
] , you get 27,700 hits when you type in "Vince McMahon Dead." That prevents most people from finding out the real story.
Of course, the WWE is continuing with the plot. Last night at RAW, they carried on the mourning for Vince McMahon for the seventh straight day. His daughter Stephanie spoke. "While it was sometimes surprising, you have no idea how much it meant to me and my family," Stephanie said, according to WWE.com. "My dad wanted to leave this world the same way he lived in it, in the biggest way possible." McMahon then said that next week would be a celebration of her father's death and she vowed to find out who blew up her father's limo.
Now, let's go a little deeper. Is it a crime for the WWE to fake McMahon's death? I don't believe so. Because a police report wasn't filed and McMahon isn't creating any sort of phony documentation or cashing in on a life insurance policy, it doesn't seem like there's any exposure here.
But I still think there's a possibility the organization could be sued by a shareholder. By announcing that he is "presumed dead" on their official Web site, they could be charged with misleading stockholders. There's no evidence that a slew of people bought the McMahon news on Wall Street. As of Monday's close, WWE stock is down only 1.8 percent since the "accident." You'd think if McMahon really died, the thing would plummet. That being said, I think there could still be a claim.
Questions? Comments?
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes