The upcoming WWE brand split between WWE Raw and SmackDown is without doubt one of the biggest talking points in the industry at the moment, since it is all set to alter the direction of the company for many years to come. Plenty of people have shared their views on how it will pan out but there is no doubt that Eric Bischoff is one of the best people to speak to regarding the whole thing and recently he spoke about it in the 126th edition of The Ross Report hosted by Jim 'JR' Ross.
Bischoff spoke about his own experience with Ted Turner and WCW Thunder in order to make a point that it can often go wrong. "I was faced with that challenge when Ted Turner basically mandated that Thunder become a primetime show on TBS when I already had one primetime show on TNT. And there was no choice but to figure out a way to create two separate brands and I wasn't successful, by the way. I acknowledge that. But because I had to try it and because I had to try it in a very high profile way, tried to have feeling for it. And WWE tried it. They didn't try it, they did it. But I'll let other people decide how successful it was. Right after the brand split was announced, somebody asked me on Twitter and I responded. Can it be successful? Sure, it can be successful. What's it going to take? A tremendous amount of creative discipline."
He went to add that the WWE must be able to create unique identities for the two shows and stated, "If you're going to make the brand split, then, by definition, they have to be different from each other. It can't just be part one and part two. Monday Night RAW on Monday and Monday Night RAW part 2 called SmackDown. If you do that, it's going to die and that's kind of what I did. And without casting any aspersions to the billion dollar company, that's what they did the first time. You couldn't really differentiate between the two significantly enough for the viewer to feel like they were two separate brands. You can't just use blue lights on one show and red lights on the other one and call them different brands when the talent is going back and forth and there's no distinction. It requires a tremendous amount of creative discipline."
