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Engagement is a Key Metric for Brand Success

As humans we are social beings. In fact, in some sports leagues, who have trouble filling the stands, they have moved to smaller, more quaint venues. Fenway Park is Fenway – packed and the place to be. The Old Olympic Stadium where the Montreal Expos played could fit 80,000 but they would only get a quarter of it filled. It felt like you were in someone’s living room, at a not-well-attended party.

It is not much different with a website, even in racing.

Case in point – The Paulick Report.

The Paulick Report engages its readers better than any racing site out there, considering its late start into the fray. At postrank.com, their labs page shows just how much engagement a website has and they have built a metric to describe it – an engagement score.

An engagement score is simply the number of mentions, links, forwards via social media, comments and other interactive measures a story or blog post has. Post Rank weights it based on importance, and voila, we have a score.

Here are three racing websites and their engagement scores for the past 30 days (click to enlarge).

As we can see, drf.com and equibase.com are information sites who fill their niche:  The visitors are racing people, or fans who know about them. There is little engagement of their readers, and in turn, a great deal of their content is static content – published, and nothing else. Paulick on the other hand has a huge engagement score. His stories are responded to, and forwarded via news readers, social media and blogs.

Why is this important? Because when you have engagement you have people doing online public relations for you, and your sport. A link or headline from a Paulick story on Facebook or Digg is seen by non-racing fans. If a non-racing fan sees and clicks a link and comes to the report, chances are they see comments – there is someone home in our stadium. It’s good for us.

This does not, of course, mean that the drf or Equibase are doing nothing for racing. They do what they do best. However, with other sports like football and its NFL.com, world cup soccer, MLB.com for baseball and many others all engaging their fans and making it a priority, it is very important for us to have a site like the Paulick Report doing the same. (the Bloodhorse.com also does a good job with this, after their restructuring).

This is especially important for us because we do not have a league office in racing.  If we could turn back the clock I am sure (well, in racing maybe not) we would have a www.horseracing.com doing what MLB.com and NFL.com are doing. But we can not turn back the clock of course. In the meantime, Paulick is acting in large part like our league site, by filtering news and opinion to non-traditional racing demographics.

Posted in Marketing, Technology.

By dean
07/07/2010

14 comments

Monmouth v Belmont, Foursquare Style

As we spoke about in a previous article, Foursquare is a newer social networking system whereby people connect with friends and “check-in” to various venues. For people who check in the most frequently, they get badges. Super-users become “mayor” of a particular venue. Sound a little strange? Yes, it does to me, but I am no longer twenty.

In the original article we hinted we might be surprised to see too many racetracks on the list (and quite honestly Foursquare was so new then we were not even sure it would fly). However, it seems some of the younger foursquare set are visiting racetracks, and they are telling their friends.

I did a quick scan today on Bing, trying out their new social search tool. I typed in Monmouth Park and found a link to Foursquare, which shows its visits, who has been there, a map to the track, and tips about the venue.

That is 215 visits from Foursquare folks, which is not too bad at all.  147 uniques and 215 visits shows a fairly good repeat visit rate, as well. Congrats are in order to John F, who seems to be a horseplayer. He’s the “Mayor” of Monmouth.

I decided to check a few other tracks. Since Belmont is more accessible to a larger population, I assumed we might see more action than its Jersey cousin. However…..

Only 142 visits. But the Mayor of Belmont? It is some guy named Joe M. I don’t know about you, but I think this guy oozes racetrack.

There are some promotional opportunities for businesses who embrace this medium. I wonder what might work for racing, or if anyone has begun to brainstorm about it.

If you would like to check more racetracks to see if the younger demo is visiting your favorite, you can at Foursquare.com.

Posted in Industry.

By Dean
07/05/2010

1 comment

The Noise of the Crowd

Brian, on our Katy Perry piece, commented this below:

I’m only 21 so I completely understand the appeal of a star like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. While I don’t like their overall image or some of the content in their songs there is no denying that they know how to excite the music world and be the “banner act”. They record songs with beats and tempos that make you feel great and make music videos so bizarre to go along that they create the “must see/hear” buzz.

I have noticed one interesting thing that happens when I get my friends or family to watch races (usually on Youtube) of horses like Zenyatta, Rachel Alexandra or Curlin. They will usually only get excited when they can hear the crowd as the horses enter the stretch. If it’s just the announcer and the cheers of the fans have been sifted out of the recording it takes most of the excitement away for them. Speaking from experience here: It’s a whole lot more fun to scream/cheer when you aren’t the only one.

I personally could not possibly agree more. I brought a newbie to the Queen’s Plate last year. Mid lane the crowd exploded. She had been to several races before but with the crowd so energized she said immediately after “wow, that was so much fun! Look at the people!”.

As an example, I submit this. Move forward to around the mile mark pole on each video (1 minute and thirty second point on the first video & and about 1:42 in video two) listen through the finish. Which one gives you more goosebumps? I believe we should produce more of video two for all our races on television. Agree or disagree?

ESPN heavily-produced sound coverage (move to 1:30)

Track feed sound coverage (listen after the race as well: Move to 1:42)

And of course, how about this? Forward to about 1:50 (and turn the sound down a little :))

Thanks for the comment Brian!

Posted in Marketing.

By dean
06/25/2010

2 comments

Katy Perry

I was at an Internet marketing conference a couple of weeks ago and we discussed myriad items relating to the genre.  The sessions were well done, covering a lot to do with every day business, but at these functions I find I tend to learn more from my discussions with participants than I do at the sessions themselves.

I had a chance to speak with a colleague for a good deal of time about branding, and how all of your marketing today has to be structured and tailored to your goal. This might sound rudimentary, however with social media, ad buys/banner ads and pay per click marketing all mixed with traditional, this is easier said than done.

I got an email a few days ago from him titled “Katy Perry”. He said “have a look at her latest video to see branding, and video branding at work.” We went on to discuss the premise that her ‘people’ know what they are doing. They are not producing a video, or scheduling a concert; everything they do involves the Katy Perry brand.

In the video he forwarded me to, “California Gurls”, they have stuck to this branding message, perfectly. The video, in my opinion (although I am not the audience), is ridiculous. But its ridiculousness builds the Katy Perry brand. It is risque (she is barely clothed). It is completely over-the-top (unless cupcake and cherry bras are mild-tempered). But it is also extremely buzzable; especially to her demo. They have also included a 1990 rapper, as part of the song and video; in my opinion for a reason. On the surface this is just a video, but it is more than that.

The video, the song, the guest singer; everything has a purpose.

After the video is done, the branding and buzz does not stop. Long ago the music industry shied away from using Youtube for their videos. Now we see this video uploaded by Perry’s people themselves, in HD, as are all her videos. They have also promoted videos about making the video itself. The page is promoted via viral marketing and social media and this media promotes Ms. Perry as it empirically does.

For a glimpse at the power of viral marketing, I did a search for feedback on this video and it was all over the net – embedded in story after story, blog post after blog post. Yes it was in the usual places, but it was in many others. Snoop Dogg’s fans were screaming about a sell out on rap and hip-hop sites (more buzz). I saw it on a marijuana board being discussed, with someone saying ‘I’m glad I was not high when watching those gummy bears. It would freak me out.’

In addition, the Katy Perry branding does not stop there. When they direct millions of people to this video they get data from Youtube insights on who, what and where their fans are. As well, with it flying around and promoted on Facebook the metrics gleaned about her customers is front and center via their system.

As my colleague noted – pure, calculated, modern, 2010 marketing.

It got me thinking about racing. If everything that I allude to is done for a Katy Perry video, right from song choice, to directing, to distribution and buzz and post click metrics, because that’s the way it is done, what exactly is racings video strategy? Is there a plan? Do we have a structured way to show our races on the web, archive them, group races together for viral videos? Anything?

I think we all know the answer, but I ended up giving it a shot. I went searching for horse names, famous race names and assorted racing searches for video. What I found was a complete mess – there was zero structure, there was no plan. There was virtually nothing that we could use for any branding or marketing purpose.

However, it gets worse than that.

Searching for “Zenyatta” on youtube brings us to some videos, one of which is a compilation of her races. Let’s leave for a moment that this video was not an industry produced one, that is SEO and search friendly, with a plan; it is done by a young girl. It has almost 1000 views in a short period of time, and it is a nice commercial for racing. If 100 newbies found this video by searching Zenyatta, and we had a 5% conversion rate for getting them to look for more information and races with her, they would not find much. In the search business this is called a dead click, or bounce out. We would not even know, however, because we don’t even have access to any post click metrics, because we did not produce the video.

Unfortunately it does not end there. This same girl also likes Rachel Alexandra, so she produced her races for youtube. Great, another free commercial for racing, right? Not so fast. She tried to upload it to youtube, but since the Kentucky Oaks win is Churchill Downs property, it is a copyright infringement and her Rachel video was removed.

She had to upload it to Vimeo. So if you’d like to watch it, you still can. I hope they don’t take it down.

I truly believe that social media marketing, video marketing and anything else that we do in racing can not be a ‘throw it against the wall and hope it works’ exercise. Video’s like Katy Perry’s California Gurls are not getting 4M+ views in a week by accident.  She is not the hottest star around because she is lucky or super-talented. It is planned. I think we need a whole lot more planning, especially with video in our sport.

Posted in Marketing, Technology.

By dean
06/23/2010

7 comments

TV Ratings Triple with Format Change

Hosts at Woodbine Live

We do not see television ratings for racing increase much anymore, although this year we saw some nice bumps for the Derby, which was welcomed. In general any rise will be small and seemingly not sustainable. North of the border, this is not the case, but it is also not your average, every day horse racing telecast.

Race Night on the Score was a long running weekly two hour racing show, pumped into Canadian homes via a cable sports network. The program was paid for by Woodbine Entertainment, as they tried to get people to watch both standardbred and thoroughbred racing, and become customers. The format was simple : show races, handicap them, show human interest stories about trainers and owners, and so on. In effect, it was the “formula” that we have seen for many years.

It is not impolite to say that it was a failure. The ratings were microscopic.

This season they made a change. They rebranded the show and called it “Bet Night Live”. Yes, a show on racing using that nasty word that we seem to want to hide every moment of every day – betting. In the new format they go after the tight market of people who want to play a game, or learn a game, while offering them a chance to win prizes, and win money. They do this in conjunction with their ADW – Horseplayerinteractive.com – and meld that into the show itself. They also have kept their handicapping expert in the mix, so serious players still get a chance to hear some handicapping, and newer ones will learn. Gone are the human interest stories that we have all seen since the medium was invented.

Laura and Sandy Hawley

The show adds the in-studio sports updates, and has a contestant picking races in studio as well. They have also nicely weaved education, for bettors and fans, old and new (tonight they have a feature on what to look for in a post parade, for example). They are selling a game and are selling a chance to make some money. They have even batted around an idea on a “pick all” where one fan has the chance to pick all the winners and walk away with $1M in cash. In a nutshell, the show is fresh, fast and nothing like we’ve seen before in our sport.

What is the result?

The ratings are up 300%.

In addition, according to Greg Blanchard at Woodbine, sign-ups to their ADW are in “the triple digit range each show”.

In Studio

We wrote about going after a targeted small slice of the game playing market like this in our piece “Positioning Racing”: “For those who would say concentrating on one type of customer pigeonholes us, I would say that is unimportant and in fact the antithesis of what successful companies are doing in this century. ” Customers of countless products or services are simply a slice of a bigger market. We cannot be all things to all people. Trying to grab a slice of a market is better than no market at all and catering to every whim and wish of what customers we would like to have is 1960 thinking – and completely wrong. It has no place in present day marketing. The team at Woodbine seems to be embracing this new philosophy, and it seems to be working. They are no longer sitting in a production meeting trying to be all things to all people or worrying about what faction of the industry they will or will not offend, they are focused on getting one slice of this market, and using the medium to achieve that goal.

Not surprisingly, the existing market – the one who likes human interest stories, stories on the horses, or on the sport itself – are upset. On a thread at an industry website where the show was being discussed, some of these insider comments, after the initial show, were:

“Not enough interviews with horsemen and their thoughts”

“I agree with Brian…it was silly, childish and amateurish.”

“I too watched this show, I was very disappointed with the new format. I had to turn it off after 30 minutes of watching.”

“Please bring back the old format. The only people who want to watch the show are real Racing fans. The new show is painful to watch and will lose more viewers than it will gain.”

Woodbine Track Handicapper Jim Bannon

Seth Godin, a marketing writer who concentrates on new marketing and the changing world wrote this about the existing market in his book Free Prize Inside:

“Satisfied customers are not likely to increase your sales. Satisfied customers are not likely to push you and your colleagues to stay ahead of the competition. One day, in fact, the competition will pass you and the satisfied customers will quietly leave.

The problem is that management really likes those satisfied customers. The first question they’ll ask about any innovation is “Will our satisfied customers like it?” Of course, this is a silly question, because satisfied customers already like what you’ve got. The question you ought to ask first is, “Will people dissatisfied with what they are doing now embrace this, and, even better, will they tell the large number of unsatisfied people to go get it right away?”

We hope this provides a lesson for us in racing. We need to concentrate on selling the game to people who are not watching, instead of those who are. The people that are already fans are already watching, on computers, racing channels, or at the track. They do not have to be sold to with mass media, the people who are not watching and are pre-qualified to play a game are. In reality, we must do a complete 180 on what we have been doing.  If we do, perhaps we have a chance to grow.

Posted in Industry, Marketing.

By Dean
06/16/2010

2 comments

Trakus Begins to Be Used in Harness Charts

Trakus, our #5 Innovation of the Decade, has begun to be used in charts. Not for the thoroughbreds, but for harness racing. In a complete shuffling of the running lines, the record keeper (Standardbred Canada, the Equibase of Standardbred racing in Canada) has added brand new statistics for punters. Here is a snapshot:

The new items are as follows:

The have added three new chart calls – start,  the 1/8th pole and the 7/8′ths pole. This is good for punters who want to see if a horse was in the two or three path for most or part of a turn, or was tucked beforehand. You can also see as a bettor, just how much speed was flashed in the last 1/8th with the new 7/8′ths call point.

Ground covered, in feet. Trakus charts this, and it has been added to the chart. You can see that above in the “dist” column.

Bettors are always looking for an edge. For those who download these charts for their own software, for example, it should add some excellent model-able new data points.

Posted in Industry.

By dean
05/11/2010

Comments Off

Monday Video

Social Media, in a neat video:

Posted in Industry.

By dean
05/09/2010

8 comments

Two Tweets For Integrity

A horseman feels his horse has a good chance. He has been darkening the horses form – “stiffing” in horse parlance – so he can get a juicy price. He sulks off into the shadows, gives a call to Vido and Vido places bets all over town. He’s 20-1 and tonight’s the night. It’s gonna be a big score. The public will be none the wiser.

In another part of the barn a trainer has brought his horse back from a 9th by 22 finish. Exactly as planned and he is all smiles. He is going to cash next time. Tell Martha to grab the kids and get ready for a paid vacation.

That is the perception out there in some quarters; we all know that.  When a horse races bad it can be explained by the shady side of racing. When a rider or a harness driver is getting instructions, that secret is protected like Fort Knox. The public should not know, because we are racing, and we keep things quiet.

To anyone who hot walks, trains, grooms, drives or rides, or owns a racehorse in today’s world it is nonsense, or so small a faction of this industry it is not worth mentioning.  Now, thanks to the Internet and racetracks who are actually trying to promote integrity, there is a medium for them to get their voices heard.

Welcome the world of harness racing to Twitter.

Last month, star harness driver and $56M career winner Mark MacDonald started to use twitter to tweet before his drives what he thought of his chances.  “Expect an aggressive drive in the 4th”, “poor drive in the 5th, apologies” or “with the rail this horse should be good. I was boxed and had traffic trouble last time” are some examples of what Mark tweets to his horseplaying followers and does so in real time. He does it with 100% transparency, right from the paddock.

So much for the dark side of racing, huh?

Fast forward to Mike Hamilton. Mike is a TV guy who works for Woodbine.  He is finally on twitter and he is tweeting his thoughts throughout the race card. Mike is a handicapper, so a good many of posts are handicapping in real time, but sometimes we get more.

In one part of the harness paddock there is the veritable “scope vet”. Here, horse owners and trainers find out why their horse raced so poorly. Some nights, especially in allergy season, or when a sickness is going around the barns, she is a busy person. Before Twitter the results of such a scope were kept quiet and no one knew why a horse raced so bad. If in three weeks this same horse won horseplayers would scratch their head and wonder if some funny business took place.  Now, thanks to Mike, and his venture into micro-blogs, we have a person who is reporting on such things.

Last week, a mare by the name of AP’s Money Maker came dead last at 3-2. She raced quite bad. Mike was there with this:

“Just watched them scoping APs Money Maker who raced poorly in race 3. Will have more to report mid-week.” 8:21 PM May 1st via web

The trainer was a stumped as we were as bettors, so was the owner and everyone associated with the horse. But this time, the bettor knew. It was not a sinister plot; the horse was probably badly sick.

Harness racing has fallen on hard times; handles are off even more than the thoroughbreds. What they have done more quickly than the thoroughbred game is realize that the game will not last forever unless change occurs  Embracing technology to attack questions of integrity like this might tell us that the people who work in it will not let it go down without a fight.

Posted in Innovation.

By Dean
05/05/2010

1 comment

Derby Marketing Paying Off

“If you build it they will come” sounds really neat in a movie, but it is no way to market an event.  Most might argue that for upwards of 100 years racing has done just that with their events. The past few years however, there has been a pretty huge change in marketing events in racing, and in my opinion, this is paying off.

This year, despite the often used excuse of “the economy” for racings ills, the Derby, in terms of both wagering volume and attendance were up. This flew right into the  face of conventional wisdom that the weather would kill attendance, and the lack of a big horse to draw wagering would hurt the handle numbers.

What happened? It is tough to gauge perfectly without seeing some back end metrics, and most certainly the last few years have been down, so year over year comparisons might be difficult, but I will take a shot. I think Churchill has learned to brand-market their big event better, and over time this has paid off.

There was hand-wringing on several initiatives from true blue race fans. I think these items are helping:

The Kentucky Oaks on Bravo. Some are upset that we are on that channel, because they do not cover racing like we want them to cover racing. The fly in that ointment is that we are not the market; we are going to watch it on Twinspires, or HRTV. This helps brand to a new audience.

The Derby Red Carpet chatter is another item that makes some players’ blood boil. I do not particularly care if a female movie star is wearing a yellow hat she paid $8000 for, or if figure skater Johnny Weir likes Ice Box, and neither do most of you. But some casual fans do, and this brands the event to them.

The Kentucky Derby Party website. We researched this item and spoke about it in February here at R2. My Derby party was two horseplayers, with three computers and two televisions, trying to make positive expectation bets. For others, who want to drink a mint julep and box four horses for some fun, this seems to be working just fine.

In addition to the above there has been a strong push on using social networks for this race and in fact, in all of racing. Being a web marketer I realize that this can be a hard sell to old business, and because we can not (but we are getting better)  measure what kind of revenue this adds to the bottom line with 100% accuracy, there are still many who find this spending does not provide actionable return on ad spend, and say a radio ad is still better.

Here are the news mentions via the web on for the Derby since 2004, via Google Trends (note, it will take some time for full searches and news mentions to show):

The reach for the Kentucky Derby website was at an all time high:

In addition via micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, the time per mention was one minute and the sentiment, good to bad was 6:1. Blogs had similar positive statistics, and news items were graded at 22:1 positive. These mediums are not going away. As a colleague said the other day, “If your company is not doing this, you are being professionally negligent.”

There are numerous problems in racing and most everyone seems to want them fixed overnight. But with brand marketing, according to marketer Mark Hughes, it takes 6 years and $60M to brand an event. If he is right, the Kentucky Derby is doing just fine and by doing simple web marketing and some cross promotion, it is not costing anywhere near $60M.

Posted in Industry, Marketing.

By dean
05/03/2010

Comments Off

Decimal Odds

4-1 and 6-1 might be the old way of doing things overseas if the new odds experiment planned for the UK works, as it was announced that decimal odds will be tried at Ascot this month for a one week period. The group who pushed for this trial is “Racing For Change” a UK consortium who believes racing must try and bring its game to new markets for it to survive and thrive.

Decimal odds are in one way the “betfairization” of racing, because the UK betting giant reports its odds in decimal form to its customers. For people who play racing, seeing 3.65 instead of 5-2 might be a akin to New Coke, but for younger bettors who are cutting their teeth on the exchanges, the opposite is true.

There are several ways to report decimal odds, and all of them are more accurate than tote odds.

One way, pure decimal, is to list the odds, to the 5 cent number plus one. For example Lil Feller in today’s first at Turf Paradise is listed at 3.15. This means he is 2.15-1, or if you bet $100 you get $315 back.

Another way is American decimal, which US bettors would understand a little better. Little Feller is listed as +215, meaing the same thing. If you bet $100 you win $215; you get $315 back.

In contrast, on the tote board at Turf Paradise, the horse would simply be shown as “2-1″, a less accurate figure.

One of the obvious benefits of reporting odds in decimal form is the benefit of final payouts. When we see a horse at 5-2, he could be paying $7 or $7.90. For a horse who moves from 5-2 to 2-1 last flash, and wins, he will probably be dealt some horseplayer wrath asking questions of funny business. In fact, there was probably not much wrong with that move when you consider he could have moved from only an $7.00 payout to a $6.90 one. Seeing that horse on an exchange moving from 3.50 to 3.45 is nothing but 5 pennies.

More than likely we can guess what happens in this instance – existing fans will want their old odds back. In a business where players play for 30 years or more we are not much for change. However, I hope they try this for more than one occasion and ask serious questions to new racing fans regarding their take on them, as well as looking at the overall potential growth picture.

Marketing writer Seth Godin wrote about this in one of his books “Free Prize Inside”, and I wholeheartedly agree:

Satisfied customers are not likely to increase your sales. Satisfied customers are not likely to push you and your colleagues to stay ahead of the competition. One day, in fact, the competition will pass you and the satisfied customers will quietly leave.

The problem is that management really likes those satisfied customers. The first question they’ll ask about any innovation is “Will our satisfied customers like it?” Of course, this is a silly question, because satisfied customers already like what you’ve got. The question you ought to ask first is, “Will people dissatisfied with what they are doing now embrace this, and, even better, will they tell the large number of unsatisfied people to go get it right away?”

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Posted in Industry.

By dean
04/19/2010

1 comment