Pro-wrestling star Mojo Rawley recently spoke with WhatCulture about a variety of subjects, including how his former employer, WWE, heavily tracks social media numbers to dictate television time for certain talents. He also says he pitched WWE on the idea of being a manager during his run. Highlights from the interview are below.
How WWE looks at social media analytics to determine which stars get TV time:
I don’t know if the fans realize how much power their tweets have, but the company sees everything and there’s a social media report that’s compiled after every TV where they track all the tweets and see if they were generally positive or negative, how many views, how many retweets, likes, all that crap and they are delivered for every segment and that’s how they dictate TV time moving forward, in a way.
Says he did pitch to be a manager:
No [I have not had any conversations with other promotions]. I’ve made it pretty clear that I wanted some time off from wrestling. I have been contemplating and maybe coming in and doing some managing or hype man work for somebody. Of course it’s harder to do that because I’m probably — it’s harder to do that. I always pitched being a manager in WWE. I didn’t wanna only manage but kind of having like a faction and being the mouthpiece and representing but, they always said it’s hard to manage guys that you’re bigger than. You know, it’s kind of backwards. I’d be open to some things like that I suppose but again, I really haven’t reached out to anyone. I’ve made it clear for anyone that has inquired about me that I’m not wrestling at this time. I got a plan in place and for me to just jump right back in, that’s not the move. Like I said, you wanna take some time, build your name and then come back when it’s right.
On pitching ideas to WWE:
Yeah, I hate to say it and I don’t want this to be perceived the wrong way but, I submitted a bunch of pitches with — that were just a wide range of feasibility and just how many — there were some that were really out there and some not so much. The RETRIBUTION, I thought was the pitch I liked the least personally, but I thought it was the one they’d go for the most, because it was a little more in line with what they’ve done in the past, and it’s the one they ran with so, hey man, the guys know in the locker room too; you can come up with this outlandish pitch for you to win the title overnight but the odds of them going with it are very slim so…
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling
)