Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using three highly visible promotional videos from the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), we perform a critical examination of the UFC’s branding during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first is a recorded endorsement from President Donald Trump, the second introduces the origin of an international pay-per-view series called “Fight Island” and the third is an end of year retrospective of the UFC’s performance in 2020. Employing content analysis grounded in brand psychology and narrative persuasion, we deconstruct the visual communication and story-based elements within this advertising to reveal how the company has adopted an identity of heroic dominance and defiance. This persona is built from a cognitively biased and framed suggestive notion which the UFC uses to market themselves as the lone organization fearless enough to “conquer” COVID-19 through the continuation of live events and overcoming obstacles posed by government regulation and media criticism. Ultimately, we find three dominant narratives actively established from this identity and heavily employed in their subsequent branded content: “Sport Must Go On,” “Unstoppable Force,” and “World Gone Crazy.” We conclude by arguing that the UFC’s branding reifies the tenuous social and political position the young sport occupies by marketing the combat sports company as different than other mainstream sport leagues, through repeated celebration of the Dana White (President of the UFC) as a heroic figure, by their disavowal of caution in the face of a pandemic, and in portrayal of the mainstream media as a jealous enemy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".