A young fan at the Gold Cup & Saucer

It’s no secret horse racing events like the Derby and Breeders Cup are well attended. But the most watched live horse racing event you may have never heard of supplies us a strong lesson in the power of branding, buzz and being who you are

It’s two minutes to midnight on a Saturday in August. Thousands upon thousands of racegoers are waiting for the call to the post. The concession stands are quiet, the Ferris wheel beside the track has no one on it. Horsemen, fans and grooms are draped over the backstretch fence. Teenage girls dressed as jockey’s are holding a trophy, and flanking them is a singer, bellowing out a traditional island anthem. The lights go out and a spotlight from the roof of the 120 year old oval is switched on.

Each horse leaves the side paddock and the light centers right on them. Announcer Vance Cameron does not only announce the horses name, owners name and drivers name – he tells a story about each horse, and if the owners and driver is not local, he thanks them for coming. The crowd applauds each horse, whether they are even money or 100-1, and the connections salute them, usually with a huge smile and a wave of the whip.

Perhaps the most unique race on this continent is the Gold Cup and Saucer in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. The annual harness race has a $60,000 purse (well below the Hambletonian and North America Cup’s $1.5M) and does not attract the top horses in the sport, but don’t tell the people watching that.

PEI, for those who do not know, is an Island on the east coast of Canada, connected to the mainland by a ferry and a recently constructed bridge. The entire island can be circled in less than a few hours by car, and its population totals about 135,000, or the size of a small city. It is a 16 hour plus drive from Toronto, or New York, or Pennsylvania where most of the harness industry does their business. But each August, several trainers load up their stock (when they can race for a similar or larger sized purse at home, no less), people plan their trips and head to the east coast, in pursuit of participating in, or watching the Gold Cup and Saucer.

Hundreds of races are run during the week

Why do all these people go to the race, and why do trainers and owners want to win it, sometimes shipping for two days to compete? It is like an allowance runner shipping from Monmouth where he can race for more money, to North Dakota for less money. For race fans, they can see a million dollar race and spend some time in Manhattan or Toronto, and catch a broadway show on off race days instead. But they come to PEI in huge numbers.

The race is a part of “Old Home Week”, which is not unlike a county fair, or homecoming week. This week provides an excellent branding opportunity for the race, which they have taken advantage of. The whole week – the parties, the parade, the fair – all push the end of the week spectacle – the horse race. For anyone who visits, it is impossible not to know that a horse race is happening, and you better be studied up on it, or people will give you a funny look. Being married to the fair aspect of the week, was a very smart thing to do.

Jeremy Pierce, former manager of Harness Racing PEI, has a career in sports marketing, and has worked for the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets. He and the team has brought grassroots marketing to the event, and he thinks its uniqueness and spirit helps sell itself.

Old Home Week Parade

“The one thing we always talked about with the GCS is that we wanted to bring ‘the race to the people’ rather than rely on ‘people coming to the race.’ We actively start the promotion of the race months in advance – actually the campaign starts on opening day” he said.

The side attractions like the 4H club displays, the stands selling PEI potatoes and homemade jam, the fair, the cotton candy and the rest of the “down home” friendliness is not for everyone, but they are not marketing to everyone. They do not sell flash, or big city ceremony – they wear their heart on their sleeve and sell who they are. PEI is 4H clubs and down home hospitality, and they do not apologize for it or try to hide it. That is a strong part of marketing, which has stood the test of time – always be who you are, because consumers see right through you if you are not.

“When OHW rolls around, the sole focus is on hospitality. Not only for the GCS horses, owners and trainers, but the fans. We were all too well aware that this was the only time of the year that most come to the track. And if it is the only time of the year that they come, we want to ensure that they have the best time possible to ensure that they pencil in next year too. We build the horses up as heroes at the track and in the media.” Pierce added.

“I have been to the last 18 in a row” replied Harvey Timmons, a 36 year old police officer and racing fan from Trenton, Nova Scotia. “I have started new jobs, had birthdays to go to, anniversaries, but I always make it for the whole week. It’s a time to catch up with old friends, meet some new ones, watch fantastic racing and have a great time.”

Illustrating the impressive cross promotion of the event, Timmons elaborates on the racing.

“When you arrive in town for the week, everyone is talking about the race. It is not uncommon to see a stranger on the street ask you who you like. Sometimes you end up having a beer and discussing it”  Timmons explains. “We do not get to see a lot of speedy horses in this part of the world, so when they come, we all come.”

As for the event itself, it is well-reviewed.

“One of the best things I have ever seen in racing was this year when winning driver Scott Zeron took the horse around the fence and high-fived everyone he could. It’s the little things like that you see here that you do not see anywhere else” Pierce said.

“The race-night is fantastic”, Timmons added “The post parade is the best in the sport – by a mile. Everyone feels welcome from a child (mine’s 18 months & she had a ball) to the hardened fan, to a grandma there to spend time with her family, to the guy who gets bombed in a beer tent and won’t remember the night at all. The focus is on enjoyment and they use horses to do it which helps make a casual fan into just a fan.

“When the race is over, the week is over and you can feel it. But then we know that it is only one year away minus a week. It’s time to get ready for next year”

We have dozens of big thoroughbred races with low attendance, and some of the triple crown races in harness racing’s big cities can barely get one twentieth of the visitors this little race that no one has even heard of gets. In fact, racing has televised some thoroughbred races on ESPN and others which get barely 200,000 viewers. It seems surprising that this can succeed in such huge numbers. Not to mention, while many events in racing are free, or a tiny admission, the Gold Cup pass is $20, and parking is not cheap either. If the event is worth it, people will pay.

I believe, from having been there, it’s the pure buzz marketing and word of mouth, as illustrated by Messrs Timmons and Pierce, that works. In fact, that is the way I found about this race. It was not even simulcast; I just had person after person ask me if I have ever been there for the event. After I told them no, they told me in no uncertain terms that I better get out there – the people are friendly, you will have great food and meet some great friends. I have rarely gotten that advice for any race with such verve or passion, even the Breeders Cup or Derby. So I went; and yes, I am glad I did. Those people are exactly right – it is a slice of rural Canadiana, and for a city boy, it is refreshing, relaxing, different and fun.

In terms of horse owners and trainers, the staff tries their hardest to bring great horses to the event.

Jeremy Pierce: “We have bent over backwards as hosts to owners and trainers by sending them golfing, deep sea fishing, or simply giving insights into PEI ’s best hidden beaches. The more we can do for them, the more they sell the race to other owners and trainers when they return to Ontario , Quebec , Eastern US , etc. In essence, they become unofficial ambassadors. We want to have high return visitation and participation amongst owners.”

On the Internet things are not much different. I was scanning the chat boards this year for this race, and there was that same buzz, which surprised me, because for years this race was never really followed by people outside eastern Canada. On a Canadian racing chat board I notice a pool is going on with people making their picks. Amazingly, on a US board, there is a thread about this race, a race which has never been seen on simulcast outlets in the lower 48, and in all honesty, should not appeal to these posters.  These people making picks and posting video from youtube on the chat site can walk down the street to their local venue and see better horses, but there they are talking about PEI and the Gold Cup and Saucer. It is absolutely strange, because it would be tantamount to a thread started on Paceadvantage.com about the sixth at Finger Lakes. Regardless, this bodes well as the organizers start expanding reach by signing up simulcast outlets to try and grow handles.

Can live racing succeed by marketing events? Can small events at a Pocono Downs or Mountaineer or Turfway, or Yavapai Downs succeed? If you asked 100 people in racing who have tried, many would say no. But, I believe they have a shot. If they follow the Gold Cup and Saucer example and marry themselves with an event, and make their event a unique and interesting culmination of it, the buzz might just end up bringing in more and more people.

Jeremy Pierce believes their formula works.

“The GCS is different than most races, because it is an event for both the participant and the fans. We have always seen it that way. I believe that this was the original intent of the race founders, we just continued that approach.”

Maybe it won’t be the Kentucky Derby, but perhaps it does not have to be.

As Mr. Timmons alludes.

“The only thing that compares to it is the Kentucky Derby, which I have been to and enjoyed immensely. But given the choice, if I could only go to either the Derby or the Gold Cup and Saucer in a given year – my ass would be in Charlottetown.”

For a look at this years race from two Saturday’s ago, here you go. The winners ceremony at about 5:00 is a joy to watch. It is not a large purse win, but the owners look more excited to win this than a million dollar race.

Tweets started not long after the race, and the chatter continued for several hours.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

But there are a few conditions.

Andrew Twaits, who is Australia’s Betfair head, looks at the new rules on his widely read blog.

Some of the conditions Racing NSW has decided to include in their “internet access” approval process rival anything the Chinese government could come up with as part of its internet censorship policy. They include requirement for punters to:

• allow Racing NSW to install special monitoring software on the laptop;

• only use the approved laptop when on a NSW thoroughbred race course;

• only use the laptop to access approved wagering websites (i.e. no racing information sites and no emails); and

• pay Racing NSW an unspecified annual monitoring fee.

In other news, the track announced that they will be providing, for on course phone calls, two dixie cups and a piece of string.

Twaits concludes with what probably will happen: “As long as these new local rules of racing remain in place, Racing NSW will be giving its core funding base – the punters – yet another reason to stay away from NSW race courses.”

Quick Notes:

I did get another chuckle, this time from our friends at PETA. Watch out for them if  they land Sex.com.  You heard it at R2 first!

We spoke of Foursquare in an article below. They are growing like a bad weed, signing almost 100,000 customers in 10 days.

Nice infographic from Mashable about Twitter. Is anyone shocked that “pointless babble” is such a big slice of the pie?

Since we deal with many of these statistics each day here at r2, our second video is the history of all things net. I found it really well done, and some of the stats are eye-opening. It is hard to believe that with all this going on, ADW betting over the internet for racing is still below 20% of total wagering. Is the glass half full, or half empty?

For about a year now, more and more companies are scanning message boards, twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media avenues using software, or consulting firms. One easy way for us to do similar, with whatever we’d like (free! But not quite as accurate mind you), is to use socialmention.com. It is a simple search based tool which scans the web for such mentions. It also adds some interesting statistics on sentiment, passion and reach for brands or keywords.

So, let’s check it out for the two protagonists in the Apple Blossom, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.

The sentiment index is fairly good. For every one bad mention, there are three good ones for a 3:1 ratio. If your followers are passionate (represented by the passion number above) that means they are likely to tweet or post often positively about the item in question. Zenyatta’s followers are pretty passionate! If you look at some subsets, these stats seem to hold well for blogs, news and mentions.

How about Rachel?

Once again these Rachel fans kick some butt. With only 26 “bad” mentions to 212 good, the 8-1 ratio dwarfs Zenyatta. The passion index is less than her rivals’, but if all those Zenyatta fans had to counter all the Rachel ones, I would think it would explain that pretty well.

This simple principle of marketing happens with many successful ventures, and it tends to be often planned.

In Buzzmarketing, Mark Hughes speaks of the American Idol phenomenon. As most know, American Idol visits city after city, lines-up virtually everyone in huge lines (even terrible singers), offers press passes for local media for a behind the scenes look, and more.

One would think it would be much easier to schedule several days of auditions in LA and New York instead, and weed out some of the dead weight. They would still get a good crop for the show, and could hand-pick a few duds for the William Hung factor. However, they don’t do this because the buzz created by visiting each city, and having tons of people audition, is vital to its success. The people who audition will tell friends and family, and those friends and family will watch the show, and tell more friends and family. The local media buzz in each of these cities ensures human interest stories about the local auditions are promoted on TV, in print and radio, and then replayed on Youtube and other web-media outlets at a later time. If it was economical to audition in 1000 cities I am sure they would, because each city, and each person helps.

A show like American Idol was built to succeed from the very beginning, because of networking and foresight.

I thought about this for a time, and realized, did we not have the same thing happen with the biggest match race in thoroughbred history, War Admiral and Seabiscuit? In Seabiscuit, An American Legend, the author spoke of the zig-zagging train journey for the Biscuit between California and Maryland (in total he traveled over 24,000 miles by train in his career). Along the way the train would stop, and the horse would be greeted by regular folks, including a bevy of reporters. This of course provided built-in marketing for the race.

It was reported in the book that bookies in New York could not come even close to setting proper odds for the race, because “95% of the wagers were on War Admiral”. It seems the east coast had their horse, but in the end the odds were much different, and it is relayed several times in the book that the Biscuit was America’s choice to win.

Could it be because fans and media, at whistle stop after whistle stop for twenty-some thousand miles, saw and could touch their hero, and spread that message through their own networks like a virus that he was their worthy choice? Could it be that this race was the most listened to race ever, because of this old-time social networking? Was Seabiscuit (and the race itself) more popular than by all rights he should have been, because of this journey?

We are a month away from the Rachel-Zenyatta race.  We complain and lament that the major media is pretty much ignoring the race, not giving it the respect it deserves.  But buzz does not happen by accident. The few times it is not planned and actually succeeds, is the proverbial lightning in a bottle.

We certainly will not see Rachel and Zenyatta on a whistle-stop tour by train, but I would submit we need a metaphorical train ride and some planning of such, to make this event as electric as it should be. If we look to Seabiscuit – the match race marketer – we might all learn a thing or two.

The Cantor Exchange is one such place (it is waiting for regulatory approval). Scheduled to start trading in April, this exchange will focus on (among other things) a movie market.

“Soon, everyone —I mean, everyone — will be able to bet on the boxoffice, and make or lose lots of money on the outcome.”

They will be using the web as it should be: to viral market buzz. It is speculated that studios, as part of their advance marketing, will try and use a service like this to create buzz about a new film, making sure it is trading at a fairly high price. This would be nothing new. It has been speculated that some presidential candidate supporters have done similar on intrade in the past.

Markets like this struggle for volume, but with studios encouraged to participate (and creating inefficiencies at the same time), it sets the table for a ready-made market; one which the public will participate.

Betting via the internet has been left to horse racing alone in the past few years (legally anyway) and this is yet another new competitor for online betting dollars. With a foot in the door it is not out of the realm of possibility that Cantor can build a brand, economies of scale, and foster more and more political connections whereby if new forms of wagering are allowed for a trading market, they will be first past the post.

This, to my knowledge, is a first for the US in a very public way. In Canada, it was announced recently that governments in Quebec and British Columbia, are looking at online poker, so the ship appears to already have sailed north of the border.

It has struck many web observers who are race fans as flummoxing that racing has not used their monopoly to expand into some of these areas earlier this decade. Betfair had been growing with similar bets and it looked to be a revenue driver of some sort for racing overseas over 8 years ago. Using racings political clout to get regulatory approval for a betting market, where they could easily expand into Oscar betting, sports betting, presidential betting and so on should they get things approved as Cantor appears to have gotten done, would have given racing a new revenue source in North America. This would have been cutting edge of course, and in a growth betting sector, unlike slots money which is becoming watered down and older. As well, they would have already staked ground in the sector and if new entrants pop up they would have a hard time cutting into racings markets, because of the volume and goodwill gained by being first in the space.

It is water under the bridge now perhaps, however it still brings up a couple questions for racing.

* If Cantor can do this for movies, what stops TVG/Betfair from doing it for racing?

*Would some enterprising racing organization make a move in this sector, and could they succeed if they started right now by setting up a racing exchange? For example, if Kentucky is not giving racing slots, could Keeneland and CDI be approved for such an exchange as a political act of goodwill from lawmakers? With a built -in betting market and customer base (eg horse race bettors enjoy the chase and are much like other sports bettors) they would be far ahead of any onshore competition.

Those are clearly questions out of our scope, with this space guarded by myriad state and federal laws. However, if Cantor can get it done for something like box office receipts, perhaps this is something we should learn more about.

Case in point, the Super Bowl. Vanessa Fox looked at the top searches yesterday for the big game.  She learned that most people were asking the same question, “what time is the game?” In fact, with a little bit of datamining we can see each year this is the top trending search term on game day. However, as Ms. Fox showed, sites like NFL.com and CBS do not provide content as well as they could for this term, and voila – traffic is sent elsewhere. It pays to keep on top of these things as eyeballs are king, and our customers need to find our branded pages to get our message through.

If we look at overall searches for the Super Bowl, after the main terms are taken out, the following are top searches for the game and these can provide us with branding go-to items:

Super Bowl Parties

Super Bowl Recipes

Super Bowl Commercials

Every NFL site branding this game (or if you run a Super Bowl website) should have dedicated pages to these items. The Super Bowl is more than a game, it is branded as an experience. Parties, recipes and commercials should be promoted heavily.

Now, let’s switch to the Kentucky Derby to see if we can learn anything. These are not “near post time” searches, but overall searches:

This gives us some good clues, most of which those of us inside racing might know, but might not promote well enough. Taking gambling aside (sites like DRF handle those well) and looking at the masses, we can see just what gets them going about the Derby.

Kentucky Derby Fashion – NBC shows what horseplayers think are the “goofy” red carpet activities. This might be goofy to someone sitting at home watching race replays, building a track profile, and doing a dosage study. But it is not to the masses. Promoting the fashion angle is huge for the general public.

Parties – As Jess pointed out on her blog, parties for the Derby are cool (minus the picture of course).  “Kentucky derby infield” is also a search. There have been changes to policy via infield activities recently. This is an area that needs to be made a priority perhaps.

Packages/Travel – A big seller.

The response to this has been good from racing. Kentucky Derby Party has their own website, focusing on many of these issues. Notice the site is tailored to the female demo, and this is probably a good idea. The only suggestion is perhaps they should get that countdown clock updated; “Kentucky Derby Date” and “Kentucky Derby Time” are both key search terms. Showing “0′s” across the board on the clock – not good.

We often hear gripes from inside racing about selling the Derby (or the Oaks) along non-traditional lines. The searches seem to prove that this angle is not a waste of time – it’s built on sound principles.

As we go deeper and deeper along the tail we can see more and more searches which people are interested in, like “museum”, “pictures” and “memorabilia”. Tailoring web content to the long tail can help us get our message out.

As the race gets nearer we can use search to find the hot items, just like super bowl start time, and market to that. Search is a real-time focus group and we can use it to our advantage.

This takes care of a big day, like the Derby. But what about small tracks running each night, or races like the West Virginia Derby and others of a similar ilk? Seeing what your on-track customers are searching for can help you make these events better, and it should be part of each tracks market research.

2,885 people responded to the question of their age:

Under 25: 9 (0.3%)
Age 26-39: 259 (9.0%)
Age 40-55: 1,182 (41.0%)
Over 55: 1,435 (49.7%)

These are no surprise and we all know them to be true.

We looked before at some other websites which cater to gambling.

Betfair.com (some data estimated):

We hear a great deal about “getting young people to the track” and often that is accompanied with a message of bands, giveaways and cheap beer. In addition we hear suggestions about having less time between races because of short attention spans, or making racing easier to understand with dumb-downed past performances. That might be a good strategy for a slice of the market, but for people who are interested in following racing from a gambling perspective, it appears the medium is much more important than the message.

In the late 1990′s we saw the rise of the chat boards – which I would argue are just like Twitter, only worth less money. There we communicated with like-minded folks on whatever topic we chose to. We learned words like “troll”, learned acronyms (some for some really cool swear words), and built friendships. A little later came the blogosphere, where again interaction was paramount. Not soon after – social networking like Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of other sites and avenues were here to stay.

That was all fine and dandy, and we have discussed here and elsewhere how late racing is to the party for much of this. However, I wonder if we can look forward. What is next, and can racing do anything to be ahead of the curve instead of behind it? I am notoriously bad at predictions (my 6th race “can’t miss” key at Turfway today is evidence of that), so I won’t do much more but bring up a  few things that crossed my desk …..

1. Youtube TV: As Jessica said via twitter last week, Youtube is going to broadcast live cricket games via their medium for the Indian Premier League, in an exclusive deal. This is clearly a first. And it does fit in with a prediction for television for the next ten years, here. The author believes that TV will become less and less relevant this decade and “global communities will dominate the media”. Churchill signed a $2M deal with television recently. Should we be doing something different instead?

2. The Ipad: I must say this looks cool. Since I have a netbook, Blackberry, laptop and desktop I need one like a hole in the head. However, what if racing video could be really, really cool on this? I would probably buy one. In addition our older demographic seems to be married to the past performances. I bet they would look great on this and maybe an enterprising daughter or son could convince their father or grandfather to give it a shot? The bright interface with flippable pages sure would be neat at the simulcast center.  And the first time one of these guys click a horse on their Ipad and get a video replay of the horse’s last race via quick wifi, it might be infectious.

3. Foursquare: Them damn kids today are always doing something new. This time it’s using Foursquare. Foursquare is a 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 strange? Well, someone likes it – they recently received $1.35M in start-up capital and their traffic has gone from zero to 400k uniques in a few months. Businesses are just starting to get in on this by offering deals to foursquare-ers (I have no idea if that is a word, but I am sure it will have one soon) and something is brewing here. Although things like this do not sound plausible for racing now, especially with the demographic, perhaps they will (or should be) on the radar. I don’t think it is a terrible idea to offer foursquare deals to folks who might want to be mayor of the track.

It seems each month something new comes along. Winning companies have paid attention to the way we communicate and I think its best we do too.

In Buzzmarketing, writer Mark Hughes says that people are 28 times more likely to tell others about a bad experience than a good one. Pre-net this might result in some bad karma, and maybe a small slice of lost sales. After all, word of mouth could spread, but it took time, effort and had to have that certain edge to tap into psyche of the public.

With the Internet this has all changed – things can spread in minutes not weeks.

On Saturday as everyone knows, the jocks at Penn National voted to not ride horses owned by Michael Gill. Immediately the buzz from the backstretch started. Text messages, chat board posts, tweets and more. The virus was unleashed. Quickly jumping on this was Ray Paulick of the Paulick Report.

His original story spawned 187 comments.

His next story had 135.

His next (this morning) has 50 or so and counting.

If you believe statistics that say only 5% of so comment on stories via the medium, that is a ton of interest in this story.

In addition, this story was quickly picked up by the regular media, has resulted in possibly 200 or 300 pages on chat boards, probably hundreds more comments via email. All in about 72 hours.

Ten or twenty years ago there were similar stories like this, but they had a tough time spreading quickly. Maybe an industry trade magazine would have it as a story in your mailbox a month later. You could not comment on the story, unless you write a letter to the editor to run a month ahead of that. Maybe there would be some sort of meeting if people we energized enough.  The buzz would be muted, and it would probably all go away. Racing itself responded fairly slowly to any controversy back then, because that is the way they are built. They did not have to respond quickly.

Racing in 2010 is just like it was before – much of it is still behind closed doors. We have heard nary a peep from anyone inside racing about this, while customers and fellow horse owners are typing away. It makes for trouble, because when customers, participants, industry watchers, bloggers, websites and so on are living in a transparent world, and participating in the conversation, while racing is not, there is a disconnect. And those disconnects are not good for any business.

Creating a Facebook page for a three word message seems ridiculous, however the ridiculous sometimes works – “I’m with Coco’s” avatar FB page has 318,000 fans, in about a week.

I remember thinking of starting an “I’m With Frankie” Facebook page when Magna was going through some trouble, but I was cautioned by many that it would probably have fewer followers than a Bernie Madoff Fan Club page. Upon further reflection, I think they were right.

I read recently that CDI has secured a deal to get Kentucky Derby prep races shown on NBC; they will be paying a couple of million for the prep-race infomercials. It’s no surprise I think this is a poor use of funds, as I believe that selling to the masses, or preaching to the choir will not help us in the long-run. I know many do not agree, and that is fine, however some of my reading this morning makes me think I might be on the right track:

Online television station Revision3 offers the aforementioned Conan O’Brien a job. Online stations are gaining more and more market share, specialty stations are as well. I personally liked the CDI deal with Bravo as it speaks to a newer market and racing can be shown in a different way – that is fine. But hammering old-network TV and having to pay for it? Not fine, in my opinion.

Second, Michael Learmouth at Adage has a feature on web tv and the possible loss of cable’s/network’s market share. He believes that within a few years cable companies, and the way we watch TV in general will be forever changed.

Some quotes: “At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, cable operators got a look at a device that could start to eat into another core business: TVs with built-in Skype access. LG and Panasonic announced partnerships to start shipping the sets later this year.”

“….. customers are cutting back on cable bills: while rates go up every year, the average amount consumers are paying for digital cable dropped from $79 a month in the third quarter of 2008 to $70 in the third quarter of 2009 as they drop additional channels and services,”

“Parks Associates estimates that the consumer electronics industry will sell 80 million net-connected TVs by 2013, and there are already 20 million net-connected Xbox consoles in circulation.”

I think spending a couple of million on what we will be doing tomorrow, is better than spending that same amount on what we will not be doing tomorrow.

Then again, that opinion is what it is. Remember, I did want to start a “I’m with Frankie” Facebook page. :)

Bing wants partners

If you are like us, getting race results, historical data, replays or pretty much anything else to do with racing is a maze. Equibase is the central de facto source, but DRF has results, as do ADWs. Sometimes YouTube has race replays, sometimes ADWs do, and sometimes track web sites do. One stop shopping? Hardly. Half the time I do not even know where to go, whether on my desktop, netbook or BlackBerry. In harness racing it is as bad or worse, with several data publishers moving in seemingly different directions.

Search engines can fix much of it. And for other sports, they have done just that.

In the UK, Google has partnered with soccer to give flash results, stats and more. If you search for a soccer team — in this case Arsenal — you immediately see the past results and the next game. In addition, you can drill down to see stats, historical results and so on:

This has not gone unnoticed across the pond. Google has done the same for many major sports in North America.

Microsoft’s search engine has joined the fray of late, trying to be a player. They are fighting for market share from search giant Google and they have spent oodles of cash on web marketing, partnerships and scores of television commercials. Slowly but surely they are increasing search market share. Just this past week they announced their excellent real-time NBA search algorithm. Others are doing this, like Google, but Microsoft plans to go one better.

Here is a screen shot when you search the LA Lakers, courtesy the Bing Blog:

How about searching for a player like Lamar Odom?

I hope this has piqued your interest, because it sure piqued mine.

R2 contributor Jules Boven, Marketing manager of harnesslink.com, wrote an article about this concept, creating a mock-up of what this would look like in Google for a harness horse named Arch Madness, the 2007 Breeders Crown Champion trotter. All you have to do is type in “pp” and the horse’s name, and voila!

So, whether you are at a restaurant or at the track, and you want to look at the trip notes for a horse coming up in the sixth, or maybe you want an easy link to a race replay without logging into your ADW and waiting and waiting with slow bandwidth, or maybe you want a horse’s last running line because you see something on the simulcast channel that catches your eye, you would type your query into a search engine, get the results, and then maybe make a play.

In addition, this could revolutionize the way data is stored for racing. We have not done well at all storing our history. This might be a way to start such a project.

If I were racing, or if racing had a central authority, I think I would be looking into a partnership not with Google, but with Bing. Working historical results, video replays, blogs and more into the search engine, just like other sports have done, would have to help us. Bing could be the search engine of choice for racing — and racing would give back by promoting it as such. And we do have a lot going for us in this regard. Racing is a data-rich game; making Bing the official search partner would surely bring them a whole lot of eyeballs, which is exactly what they are searching for.

Is it a win-win? I think so. Is it doable? I do not know, but if other sports can do it, I think we should be looking at partnerships like this in racing to help brand us for 2010 and beyond.