Stephanie McMahon Credits Bray Wyatt Return For Growing Smackdown Audience

Bray Wyatt is getting praise from the highest possible place within WWE.

Wyatt’s returned to WWE at Extreme Rules after a year-long absence. His return was met with overwhelmingly positive reactions and he has since become a key figure on SmackDown. Though he hasn’t wrestled a match yet, his promos – especially those with his new Uncle Howdy character – have garnered plenty of attention.

In fact, Bray Wyatt’s involvement was so critical that WWE CEO Stephanie McMahon mentioned Wyatt by name at a Wells Fargo 2022 TMT Summit as one of Smackdown’s highest drawing acts.

“We were bringing back one of our biggest stars named Bray Wyatt. We used a multimedia approach and hired a horror writer to come in and really help us craft this narrative so our fans were engaged.”

“It’s strategies like that that really do work. The audience today is different. They’re growing, they’re evolving. Some people want to have a laid-back experience, and that’s great, but a lot of people really want to engage deeply, and have fun, and have misleads and misdirections.”

McMahon summarized the success of Wyatt’s return as coming from fan engagement. She noted that while some fans prefer having a “laid-back experience”, many more prefer being engaged and immersing themselves deeper into the stories.

She pointed to the whole White Rabbit phenomenon and the QR Codes used to hype up that mysterious image as examples of that fan engagement leading to increased viewership.

h/t WrestlingInc for the transcription