Showtime Fills Its Socials With Original Docuseries, Music, Art — Even a Celebrity Feud — for Mayweather-McGregor Fight

Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor step into the ring Saturday night in Las Vegas for what is likely to be the most-watched pay-per-view boxing event in history. The live broadcast is widely available — from satellite and cable providers, Sling TV, PlayStation, UFCTV, Showtime PPV app and ShowtimePPV.com — and has the mash-up curiosity of a 49-0 boxer (Mayweather) vs. a heralded mixed martial arts fighter (McGregor).

The fan engagement around the event has had an intensity on par with a World Series or NBA Finals (if not quite a Super Bowl) and an intensity not seen in boxing since the Mike Tyson era, which was well before the rise of social and digital media, with millions of interactions on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.

Showtime, which is producing the event, has driven interest on all of those platforms with original content — including a four-part docuseries, a new music video from The Killers, original art by graphic artist BossLogic, a faux feud between celebrity boxing fans Diddy and Mark Wahlberg — that has gone to boxing and UFC fans where they are with a steady stream of original content.

Decider sat down with Brian Swarth, Showtime’s senior VP for digital media, near the end of a harried week ahead of fight night to talk about how the the premium cable channel has approached social media and digital media to drive interest in the fight and give fans something to talk about.

DECIDER: We’re talking on Thursday afternoon. What has this week been like for you — totally crazy or just a lot of execution and checking things off lists?

BRIAN SWARTH: We’ve got a really strong team on the ground covering fight week in Las Vegas. We’ve got a lean team that has done events like this before, but the audience and the enthusiasm around this fight is still pretty unprecedented.

Has social media evolved to a point where you can’t it squarely into either marketing or content for Showtime?

The two go hand in hand. For us, social is a critical component of our overall marketing strategy. We see a lot of audience on social that doesn’t see other forms of advertising and marketing. Like we do with our original series, we looked at developing unique content for specific platforms. For this fight in particular, we’re talking to an expanded audience — the UFC and MMA audience — than for our usual events.

Is social engagement around this fight important for Showtime for general brand engagement and driving interest to Showtime PPV? Are those the two buckets?

From a business perspective, our goal is obviously to drive as many pay-per-view buys as possible through Showtime PPV and all of our distribution partners. On the social side, it elevates the Showtime brand and gets us in front of a new audience. We’ve seen engagement growth around our social platforms that has been pretty unprecedented for us.

Showtime has a docuseries called All Access: Mayweather vs. McGregor that’s four half-hour episodes. Where are people watching that?

Everywhere. We ran it on Showtime exclusively for a few weeks released the first episode on digital and social day-and-date with when it aired on Showtime. And then Monday of this week, we released the other three episodes across digital and social. The viewing of that has been strong across platforms.

Even if you’re a Showtime subscriber, you have to pay for the pay-per-view for the fight. Can you tell whether new monthly subscribers are coming to Showtime because of awareness around the fight?

We have an offer in the market now that if you sign through Showtime PPV you get a 30-day trial for Showtime, and we’ve seen a lot of people signing up and selecting that.

How have you seen different things work on different social platforms — Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook — around the fight?

We’re doing different things on different platforms. On Instagram, we partnered with the graphic novel artist BossLogic to make six pieces for us that feature the fighters. The artist already has a big bulit-in following on Instagram [480,000 followers], so that’s been a great environment for us. For Snapchat, we produced a four-episode show that has done phenomenally well in views, time watched and in subscriptions to the show. We’re also doing a feature Saturday on Snapchat, and there will be some content on Twitter sponsored by Beats.

Are you doing most of your original content on social platforms from your main Showtime account or from accounts that you set up for this fight?

For the most part we’re using Showtime Sports and Showtime Boxing, and our partners are sharing and retweeting. We released a video earlier this week with Diddy and Mark Wahlberg from our handles, and then they retweeted and bantered back and forth over it. We worked with The Killers to shoot a video that features a song that will be on their album that comes out next month. We released that on our handles, and the band is sharing it on their profiles.

What will be on Showtime’s socials during the fight? Will you have clips from the fight?

We will not have clips of the fight during the fight, and we won’t release any clips to the media until some time after the fight. The only way to see footage from the fight on Saturday night is the buy the pay-per-view that night, and the fight will still be available for purchase until sometime a few days after Saturday night.

The Showtime PPV app for iOS and Apple TV is new, right?

Yes, we built that specifically with this pay-per-view in mind, and we would be able to come back to it for later events.

How much does engagement on something like this fight differ from your Showtime original shows? Is it different in kind? Mostly different by volume?

It’s definitely different by volume. With the exception of our tentpole shows like Shameless that have big built-in followings, we’re blown away by the engagement around this fight. A few weeks ago we had a four-city press tour with Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor — L.A., New York, Chicago and London — and we live-streamed each of those press conferences, which generated 33 million views across platforms. Plus, we had big attendance in the arenas where we had each of those events. We knew then that this would be an enormous event.

Are you premiering any Showtime exclusives during the pay-per-view broadcast like an announcement or a series trailer?

We will have some promotion during the pay-per-view, but I can’t be any more specific than that.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.