Prior to Bray Wyatt‘s official return to WWE, clues of his arrival were littered throughout WWE, with both real life and digital hints being used. According to WWE co-CEO Stephanie McMahon, the strategy from the start was to keep fans guessing and misdirected.
During a recent appearance alongside co-CEO Nick Khan at the 2022 Wells Fargo TMT Summit (via Post Wrestling), McMahon spoke about Wyatt’s return. In the discussion, McMahon also revealed that the company hired writer Rob Fee to help come up with some of the ideas behind Bray’s “White Rabbit” campaign.
“When you think about the changes that he’s [Paul Levesque] made, the talent that he’s brought back, but not only just bringing back stars but how he’s doing that. But for example, we were bringing back one of our biggest stars named Bray Wyatt whose character is a little bit of a cult-type leader and we used a multimedia approach and hired a horror writer [Rob Fee] to come in and really help us craft this narrative so that our fans were engaged,” said McMahon. “We started doing Q.R. codes randomly in the background. Like if a Q.R. code just popped up behind us and you guys clicked on it, it took you to a link — there is no Q.R. code — but it took you to a link where there was a hangman game and then you saw this white rabbit show up. It’s what we call The White Rabbit Project.”
McMahon also touched on the more interactive part of the “White Rabbit” campaign, and mentioned that fans even ended up calling up places like the White Rabbit Record Store, or tuning into specific shows at specific times following hints in the campaign. For McMahon, this just shows how the audiences of today are much different than those in the past.
“But it’s strategies like that-that really do work because the audience today is different, they’re growing, evolving,” McMahon said. “Some people wanna have a lean-back experience and that’s great but a lot of people really wanna engage deeply and have fun and have misleads and misdirections. I think the worst thing in the world is when things are predictable from a content perspective and we wanna make them unpredictable.”
RELATED: WWE SmackDown Results (12/2/22)
