I was watching a television piece on the recently concluded Olympic games which showed the torch relay, and how it visited town upon town, all across Canada. Some folks might think such a relay to be simply symbolic, however it does much more than that from a marketing perspective. The torch visited towns, big and small, and it was at times carried by major celebrities, people in church groups, charity group participants, and many other social and community groups. The almost 30,000 mile journey created buzz for the Olympics along the way, and at each stop (sometimes in the middle of the night) local newspapers, television and townsfolk were all promoting it in their own way.

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.

Many companies want to know how the consumer perceives their product or brand, or what interests them about it, or alternatively what they might not like. To find out the answers to those questions one can assemble a focus group, spend money on a survey, among other things. But I think the both the aggregate and snapshot we get from web searches is as good as any of them. Using what we learn from web searches can help us brand better. After all, if people are searching for something, they want information on it, and answering their concerns, or their interests is a paramount goal.

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.