The company now known as Impact Wrestling started off as Total Nonstop Action or TNA. The transition of the branding began in 2010 and Eric Bischoff recently revealed who was responsible for it.
The former Impact executive discussed the company during the latest episode of his 83 weeks podcast and explained how the name was a bad idea from the start.
Speaking about the rebranding of the company from TNA to Impact, Bischoff revealed that Spike TV and Viacom who were the TV partners of the company at the time were the ones who pushed for the change:
“Spike pumped the brakes and said sorry, if we’re going to continue with this show and try to sell it, we have to rebrand it. It was a tough battle, there was a lot of push back internally, mostly from the people who didn’t have anything to do with running the business on a day to day basis from Texas, that being Panda Energy.
Mommy and Daddy, mostly mommy, didn’t want to spend the money so Spike did! Spike paid for the rebranding, Spike paid for the research, these are things the company should have been doing for themselves” said Eric Bischoff, “But they didn’t and wouldn’t so Spike said alright if you won’t, we will.”
The former Impact official also revealed that Spike was paying the contract money for some of the high profile talent signed to the company at the time as a separate budget item, outside of the TV license agreement.
Though despite the money spent on it, the TNA name continued to be associated with the promotion until 2017, when Anthem bought the company and rebranded it as Impact Wrestling officially.
