By Jeremy Maes, DEJ Experience Member

Welcome back everyone to another edition of The Audio Experience Blog on the road.

Before getting started, there is a little business to attend to on our side. We did record a show right after ROH’s first show last night but for some reason we are having trouble with the audio. We were up until about 4 a.m. this morning and we could never get it working. So, Eric is working on it this morning and hopefully we will have it up and running by this afternoon. Fortunately, it taught us a valuable lesson about planning and having a back up plan. This didn’t happen last year and now we think we just got lucky.

Anyway, ROH’s show last night was a decent spectacle, but in comparison to last year it was a step down. It was a straightforward show with two small angles and the rest was straight wrestling.

Last year there was the scary fall by Jay Brisco and the appearance of The Motor City Machine Guns to add a flare to the show. It also contained the coming out party for Larry Sweeney. They even worked in a Jim Cornette appearance; it all made the weekend unpredictable and gave fans who had not bought tickets for the following night’s show a reason to purchase another and see what they would pull out next.

Instead of taking the same road, Friday’s card featured none of the same standout angles and enticements as the previous year’s show.

Let’s get this out of the way now. It is fair to compare the last year’s show with this years show based off of the gimmick for each? These are set up as a showcase not only for Dragon Gate wrestlers and their different styles, but it serves as a primer for building ROH’s fan base. There are a lot of tourists here in Orlando and it seems there was a decent tourist turnout for the first night.

There were so many children at this show that, unless there was a large marketing shift that everyone missed, this was a bit odd - and encouraging. Seeing children at an independent show in a city with Mickey Mouse and other assorted neon signs and blinking lights was surprising. What drew them to a show in an old civic center type bunker instead of amusement parks or mini-golf with live gators? This needs investigated immediately.

There were also older - say 60s and 70s - patrons attached to the children there in the bleachers. In all of my ROH DVD viewing I cannot remember an instance of seeing children between eight and thirteen at a show. It seemed like the bleachers were littered with them.

There were also a lot of WWE shirts in the crowd as well. No, this isn’t something new, but the ROH audience is normally so skewed that anything but an old ECW shirt or just a black shirt in general stood out as odd. There was a definite possibility of making these people purchase tickets by having one stand-out angle leading in to the next night’s show.

Kids are annoying when they want something. They probably loved Dragon Kid and hated the Briscoes for tossing him around the ring like they did. But the old adage goes that you need to talk people into the building or, in this case, talk them back into the building.

Nigel cut his promo at the beginning of the show, running down the crowd and then talking about Austin Aries. It may be enough for people to return on Saturday; we will see tonight. They had Jimmy Jacobs try to recruit Austin Aries and even had Tammy Sytch come out and try her own recruiting measures. This angle fell flat with the crowd, including Lacey giving Sytch the DDT.

Unlike Detroit last year, ROH had a significant advantage on building a broader fan base. Based on the people in attendance in the commoners’ seats (bleachers), there must have been some intrigue from people who had never attended a show or purchased a DVD. ROH may do a majority of their business through their DVD sales, but selling tickets is important and goes hand in hand with them. It would have been prudent to set up the matches for Saturday during Friday’s show. There are multiple championship matches on Saturday’s show, but the only one featured is the ROH Championship match. Instead of a 30 minute intermission, there could have been some sort of interview segment or in-ring jawing between wrestlers facing each other Saturday.

A small shuffle of the show would have provided an opportunity to make some more money instantly Saturday and possibly down the road through increased merchandise sales. This is similar to my ChickFight blog a few weeks back. I talked about making small changes for better business sense and increasing the audience - and the same applies for ROH. It is going to be too late for this weekend, but in the future, when ROH piggybacks on a WWE event, a small change in production and pacing can change help.

Sooner or later those kids are going to grow up and be able to run themselves into debt with credit card bills. What better way to do that than getting them hooked on an athletic competition with a near endless supply of product to sell both old and new?

Jeremy Maes is the “J” of the DEJ Audio Experience. You can listen to that group of organized crime perpetrators every Wednesday night on the member’s portion of PWTorch.com. You can read Jeremy’s thoughts every Sunday on PWTorch.com. You can even contact Jeremy or any member of the DEJ faction on the PWTorch VIP Forum, or by email at torchmaes@yahoo.com.