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.