#2 A lack of faith
With WWE rushing to the end of a race that nobody else was competing in, they scrapped together what they could at the last minute just to kickstart it.
This entire angle revolved around the absence of Emma, so a lot more focus was put on her vignettes than what would have been given to any other type of storyline, yet those video packages were some of the worst material WWE has put out in years.
For a company that mostly does fantastic work with cutting footage together to catchy background music and interesting visuals, these appeared to be done by an intern armed with Windows Movie Maker, a stock glittery gold template and some photos he ripped from Emma’s Instagram feed.
If WWE really had a lot of faith in this working out, they would have spent the money to send a film crew out to film her on these beaches and exotic locales where she was wearing her expensive looking dresses and sexy bikinis and such. There would have been actual video of her, instead of static vertical images spliced together like a bad YouTube music video compilation.
For the first week, this can be forgiven. Even in the second week when things are still being figured out, it’s understandable to not have the act completely down pat yet. However, this went on for 17 weeks without much of an improvement!
Case in point, look at what tends to happen with the pay-per-views. Whenever a new one is announced, WWE puts up a very generic set of graphics on the website just to get the information out there about when it is taking place, how to buy tickets and so forth.
Soon after, those graphics are upgraded with a more official logo concept and some wallpapers which go with the theme they are building toward and it all looks like it was done with care.
When WWE doesn’t put a lot of effort into something, it shows, and when the audience can tell that the creative team doesn’t consider something worthy of time and money, then the crowd equally doesn’t want to get invested as it probably won’t be sticking around long.
Was there an uproar over the change from “March to WrestleMania” to “Roadblock” in February of last year? No, because March to WrestleMania looked like a placeholder event put together at the last minute in comparison to how Roadblock was advertised.
Emmalina clearly wasn’t something WWE was excited about, so it gave off a perception that it wasn’t something all that important for us to anticipate.
