On November 12, Manny Pacquiao will face Juan Manuel Marquez for the third time at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas; that much is known. However, what is still to be decided is just who will handle the pay-per-view broadcast. Will it be Showtime/CBS, which distributed Pacquiao’s last bout versus Shane Mosley, or HBO Pay-Per-View/Time Warner?
The bidding has just begun.
Bob Arum, whose company, Top Rank, handles the “Pac-Man” told Maxboxing on Friday, "All I can tell you is what’s happened; last night we got the proposal from HBO, which frankly, blew [Top Rank President]Todd [DuBoef] and myself away. It’s the most unbelievable proposal for a company wanting to be involved in a pay-per-view that I’ve ever seen. Huge, huge, huge, investment in assets both in Time Warner and outside of Time Warner. Just incredible. I don’t want to get into details but it looked to me like it’s $15 million worth of commercials and that type of thing. It’s being analyzed now by our media buyers. And based on that- and it appears to me to be much bigger than even the great amount that we got from CBS for the last fight- we will take what we have to CBS and see what CBS and Showtime come up with."
When asked if both entities will get one shot to make a pitch or if they will go back-and-forth with counter-offers, Arum said, "I don’t know; we haven’t decided that but that really wouldn’t be fair at all. But at some point, it’s gotta stop. At some point, we’ll say, ’Hey, you take the fight; just give us the money’ and we’ll walk away."
Arum chuckled as he said this because he knows his company and Pacquiao are in a win-win situation here. The decision to move Pacquiao to Showtime’s pay-per-view franchise caused quite the stir back in January. Not only did HBO lose one of the two big bona fide pay-per-view franchises in the sport (alongside Floyd Mayweather) but the new deal had the promise of utilizing other platforms to market the event instead of the stale, formulaic cookie-cutter that Top Rank believed had run its course. In what is now a multi-platform media age, it wasn’t just enough to promote on the network itself. The move to Showtime included their version of “24/7” getting airtime on CBS.
It’s hard to say just how much of a game-changer this was. One could make the argument that any Pacquiao fight would reach a certain benchmark. Others would argue that despite facing an opponent that was thought to have almost no chance of winning, the Mosley event on May 7th did around 1.3-1.4 million pay-per-view buys, the most ever for any Pacquiao promotion.
At the very least, it may have awoken the sleeping giant that was HBO.
"Well, I think we changed the whole nature of the business of promoting boxing on its ear; no question about it," said Arum, who did not deal with Ross Greenburg or Kery Davis, when he met with HBO, but skipped them on the corporate ladder. "Up to this point, HBO’s model was relatively limited to HBO. They did a good job but it was limited to HBO. Of course, that’s how they liked it because if you put the HBO assets against Showtime’s assets, there was really no contest. HBO is bigger, although that gap has narrowed. Now, we’ve brought in CBS and the network exposure that changed everything and now HBO, Time Warner is playing defense and they gotta come up with something to counter it and indeed exceed it- which they’ve done."
The paradigm seems to have shifted and it seems to be more of a two-horse race as it relates to landing the sport’s biggest pay-per-view attractions. Now Top Rank gets to play two media titans against each other. Even Scott Boras would be impressed.
"It’s really closed [the gap]," stated Arum, "and that’s to the tremendous advantage of Top Rank, which first of all, knows what they’re doing as far as marketing a fight and secondly, the ability to interface with both companies."
Source: maxboxing.com
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