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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In another part of the barn a trainer has brought his horse back from a 9^th 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 4^th”, “poor drive in the 5^th, 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.

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?

So, how many people tried to visit ntra.com on March 13? Google Trends hints that the number may have been unprecedented for the site. Queries for “NTRA” reached #8 on Saturday’s overall hot search terms list, spiking near the webcast’s start time — a pattern termed “Volcanic” by the search engine:

Click to view larger image

One thing was proved by the debacle (for which NTRA president Alex Waldrop apologized last night): There’s interest in watching racing’s stars online.

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.

Personally, we’ll start with football and build up to a multi-sport widget. We’ll also develop casino games. Our ambition is to have an appropriate subset of the full sweep of a gambling portfolio available on television. It’s not practical to have 250 different slot selections on a television, it’ll be a subset of that. Televisions have the advantage of being 42 inches, or 50 inches or so; whatever size screen it is, it’s usually the biggest and best quality screen in the house. The exciting thing is, if this platform is as successful as we think it might be, we can then bring real drama to the way that we present casino games. Putting the level of animation and video quality already seen online into a television widget will make it that much more of an invigorating experience.

More here.

To watch the TV in action, check the Reuters news story on Youtube here.

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.

Where do visitors of the Paulick Report go to most after visiting his site? Answer below.

Ustream has been pretty popular, and growing. Today they had close to 700,000 viewers for the Tiger Woods press conference.  There should be more horse racing on this site, in my opinion, but either our customer base does not fit the user demographic, or there simply are not enough horse fans out there playing the races. I would guess it’s a little of both. There is some Latin-American racing on there, which I find a little odd. Who did I find that out from? Who else, Sid Fernando. If an obscure race, with obscure horses, with obscure pedigrees are racing, chances are Sid knows about it.

Speaking of Latin-America, the CEO of Sportingbet says watch out for this area of the world to be the next betting market. Is racing prepared for that?

Where do visitors of Equidaily.com go after visiting that site? Answer below.

Anyone watching the Olympics online? I have been at Vancouver2010.com. For virtually any event, you can get split times, scoring and more all in real time. It is a fabulous experience, and I often keep it going while I am watching anything with judging on the television. It amazes me how we can get such awesome data-power for the olympics, but we can not seem to get anything close for racing, with data and data innovation being vital to the sports existence.

Equibase did add weather and track condition via an RSS with mobile capability to their scratches page this week. That’s a good thing. I hear through the grapevine they are getting many hits a day for this service.

Answer: According to Hitwise, the leading website for downstream visits from the Paulick Report is……… bloodhorse.com. Interesting, considering. As for our friend Seth, they read his site, then its off to drf.com.

One may think it is a malaise about something gambling related, rather than just the pure sport of racing. So I tried poker, just to see what would happen, in a cross category test:

Then I tried a bet seller, instead of a betting game.

And last, a sports related fan game:

There is growth out there, but racing is clearly having a tough time grabbing a slice of it.

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.