We’re less than two weeks away from the Battle of the Eras premiere and promotion is ramping up. Some fans feel like this is an improvement — and it certainly is more than production has done for most of its other seasons. For example, TJ never went on a CBS morning show to promote Battle for a New Champion.
But all of this promotion is coming very close to the first episode, and it feels like the show is waiting until the last minute to push out all of its advertising initiatives for its milestone 40th season.
Recently, Bananas shared some photos in New York where he was filming promo segments for various outlets including Barstool Sports, New York Post, Entertainment Tonight, and Hot Ones. And truthfully, this is more than Challenge producers have done for other seasons, but it might be too little too late.
This could expose Battle of the Eras to a wider audience, but only a few cast members were part of the New York press run. It seems TJ, Michele, Nurys, and Aneesa were also in the mix.
Allegedly, there’s also a press event in LA, but no one is getting paid and cast members are expected to pay for their travel expenses out of pocket. Unsurprisingly, few cast members are interested, and the lack of investment in this event demonstrates that the promo process is an afterthought. Theo even took to Twitter to express his frustrations with how production has been handling their talent during this promo run, reiterating that producers don’t seem to care much about the treatment of the cast.
Still, there are more efforts to promote season 40 than we’ve seen for the past few seasons, and that’s an issue. It’s not like running trailers on MTV is going to do much — few people watch the network unless they’re tuning in for a specific show. So, these commercials won’t get as many eyes on them as they did a decade ago.
Hopefully, production gets good results from its last-minute efforts to advertise Battle of the Eras. The past few seasons started out with low ratings but climbed after the first few weeks. Likely, the slow start wasn’t due to a lack of Challenge fans; rather, it was a lack of awareness. That may have been ok for a season like Battle for a New Champion, but MTV invested way more into season 40. And assuming The Challenge keeps making new seasons, the show will need to find new ways to make viewers aware of debut episodes.
In fact, there’s a pre-season intro special on Wednesday, Aug. 7, and I’ve seen no mention of this beyond Paramount’s press release. While this is not an important part of the season, it wouldn’t hurt to make people aware of it. Even a single line of text on the season trailer would have made a difference, but I guess MTV isn’t too concerned with the pre-show’s performance.
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