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A Slightly Depressing Chart

I am doing a little research this evening with a category tool which shows historical, and projected interest, in an item. You can also compare items with this tool, between parts of each category. When I compared sports interest to racing interest (standardized data) it gave me this:

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.

Posted in Industry.

By Dean
02/12/2010

6 comments

Search Branding – the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby

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.

Posted in Marketing.

By dean
02/08/2010

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Mediums and Messages

On Paceadvantage.com, “Jay Trotter” posted the demographics for people who filled out the NTRA Players panel survey recently:

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.

Posted in Industry.

By dean
02/03/2010

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Developing (Initiatives for 2010)

The Daily Racing Form reports that a group of owners, breeders, and industry executives is recruiting support for a new venture aimed at promoting horse racing through games, mobile apps, and social media:

“We’re exploring what we as a business can do to monetize our product through traditional business, instead of through gambling channels,” said [Sasha Sanan]. “We’re looking at a multitude of new technology platforms ranging from Facebook and different social media games like FarmVille, to current mobile applications, to traditional video gaming, and even fantasy sports and general interest in sports and entertainment consumption.”

Is this the same initiative as was mentioned in the Racing Post over the weekend? The ambitions of its principals, which include Satish Sanan, seem greater:

Their primary objectives include generating a revenue stream that can support the marketing of racing and bolster integrity in areas such as medication use and wagering.

The group is also considering initiatives such as the formation of an industry-held account wagering business and the creation of a national structure for American racing …

Potentially interesting — or divisive — industry developments may be ahead.

Posted in Industry. Tagged with , , .

By jessica
02/02/2010

3 comments

Foursquare and Seven Years Hence

I asked a question on Saturday on Twitter: “Do you think blog post frequency has fallen off with the introduction of Twitter?” I feel that the many bloggers out there tend to not post as much now, because if they see a link or two that is interesting, instead of writing a blog post about it, they tweet it on Twitter. I searched the web for awhile to see what people thought (I could not find much) but it did get me thinking of how have changed the way we communicate, and how it pertains to racing.

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.

Posted in Innovation.

By dean
01/31/2010

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Net Power

About three years ago a customer of a cable company called customer service to send someone over to fix their cable modem. When the repairman showed up he had some trouble and he proceeded to call customer service for a tip or two. While on hold,(for about an hour) he fell asleep. The customer recorded this sleeping repairman on hold with his camcorder and placed it on youtube. The video was an immediate sensation, and copy cats appeared. This tapped into an anger, and with the power of the Internet, Comcast had to scramble to put out fires.

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.

Posted in Industry.

By dean
01/27/2010

5 comments

Not Our Old TV

As we mentioned below, it seems Conan O’Brien has the Internet cornered; but not by his doing. Social media promotes for you, and that is exactly what it is doing. Currently several of his fans got together and created an “I’m With Coco” avatar to support the ditched NBC late-night dude.  They urged fans to change their avatars and they responded.

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. :)

Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Technology.

By dean
01/18/2010

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Branding to your Audience

I think Conan O’Brien is funny.

As most know he is more than likely being dumped from the Tonight Show sometime in the coming weeks.  In reading the demographic ratings for his show, I see that his median viewer age is 45 and he wins the 18-34 demo, while David  Letterman’s median viewer age is 57. I do not think it is by accident. O’Brien speaks to the younger set quite well.

Case in point? This week O’Brien’s team has been placing this ad on Craigslist (beware it is being taken off at times, and is off and on):

It says:

4 SALE: BARELY-USED LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW – MAKE ME AN OFFER!!! (UNIVERSAL STUDIOS)

Date: 2010-01-15, 12:55AM PST
Reply to: see below

This is the chance of a lifetime to own your very own late night talk show — guaranteed to last for up to seven months! Really must see to appreciate.

Information for potential buyers:

- Measures 100′ x 100′ x 32′ — plenty of room for a futon!

- Designed for 11:35 but can be easily moved

- Band can be sold separately

- Buyer must honor Barry Manilow booking next Thursday

MAKE ME YOUR BEST OFFER! (Also willing to trade for Coldplay tickets.)

Posting on the skewed young Craigslist, making fun of himself and the multi-million dollar corporate jungle of late night tv at the same time. “Willing to trade for Coldplay tickets.” Brilliant marketing, in my opinion, and it will be a huge reason why his viewers will follow him where ever he goes next.

It is well known that the demo’s for racing are skewed towards the over 55 set. I think we speak to them fairly well. But we don’t do a very good job speaking to people under the age of 50.

Maybe we should hire Team O’Brien as marketing guru’s. They clearly know what they are doing.

Hat tip to Gawker.com.

Posted in Industry.

By Dean
01/15/2010

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It’s Time for Racing to Partner With Microsoft

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.

Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Technology. Tagged with , , .

By dean
01/12/2010

3 comments

No Partymanners – the Web vs. the Platform

As most know there is a dispute that has halted the very popular YouTube race replay channel “Partymanners.” This has spawned serious discussion about how some racing entities have distributed (and in some cases blocked) replays via the web. Some tracks use their own websites, some use racereplays.com, others have their own ideas. We are happy to shed an opinion on this via a guest post from Raleigh. He is a 30-something racing enthusiast and tech industry professional in Northern California.

Recently a YouTube user that had been acting on his own accord as a kind of digital historian for racing ran into an unfortunate circumstance whereby all of his 1500-odd videos of races from the last 30 years were taken down over a copyright dispute.  It was not as the result of any industry action, I’m happy to report, but the loss of these videos to the general public and the outcry that followed from fans does bring up I think a useful and actionable lesson for the industry.

Websites vs. Platforms

Web 1.0 was very much a web site oriented model, where data was locked up in proprietary formats on proprietary sites.  The key development of Web 2.0 was the introduction of flexible, easy to use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allowed data to flow freely across the internet.  Sites were no longer mere sites, a place to visit to read something, they became web platforms, and web services that interacted with the larger web.  We can see this most strongly with the dramatic growth and increasing ubiquity of services such as YouTube, Paypal, Google Maps, Facebook, and Twitter.

I want to talk specifically about YouTube as a service, what sorts of things it enables, and why it is a better platform for serving up race replays than the sorts of proprietary, lock-down, site based approaches most of racing currently uses.

The approach to race replays that most of the industry uses is to use a web site based approach, that is very unfriendly when it comes to interacting with the web at large.  Users may watch videos, at some designated web site (often for a fee), but they can do nothing else.  It is very much still centered on the legacy approach, the Web 1.0 implementation. A user cannot generally share the video with anyone via email, as their is no specific url to link to.  A blogger cannot embed a video on their site to show their visitors a specific race that they are discussing. A user cannot leave a comment on the race video so there is zero social interaction, no sense of community. And since whatever site that is streaming the video is probably working on an extreme budget, the video is often of a very low quality.

Let’s examine the benefits of transitioning to a Web 2.0 model, and instead of paying for a proprietary website solution –  i.e. what is possible using YouTube as the platform instead (on which CDI is the notable leader).  What becomes available?

Each racing video has an explicit url and can be shared via email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Each racing video can be embedded easily in a wide variety of third party web sites, further extending the reach.

Viewers can comment on races. How much more interesting would it be to view the day’s replays if there were a few trip handicappers leaving comments each day?  It opens up the possibility for user-generated value add.

YouTube streams in up to 1080p, meaning the video quality is realistically only limited by whatever the track uploads.  Since using the platform is free, that is a strong incentive to use as high quality streaming as possible.

These are the most obvious advantages, but there are others.  YouTube has a rich API that can be accessed programmatically. A track that hosts its videos on YouTube need not let YoTtube be the only way of accessing those videos.  Any track could quite easily have a very structured interface on their site, consisting of pull-downs menus, calendar widgets, etc — similar to how most racing replays interfaces are done now — except they access the YouTube API and pull videos from YouTube.  One need not rely on visitors going to YouTube at all — but using them as a platform allows for a better on-site experience than visitors get now, at no recurring cost.

Although I should say the YouTube interface is not bad, it is just not what people are used to.  We’ll use CDI as the example.  They use a consistent naming convention for their replays, of TrackName, Date, Race #, for instance FAIR GROUNDS, 2010-01-10, Race 1.   If I type Fair Grounds 2010-01-10 into the YouTube search box, I get all the races from that day as results.  Not a bad way to go.  I have a YouTube widget on my homepage, so accessing racing replays for CDI tracks could not be easier, all I need to do is enter what I want and I’m watching a video 2 seconds later.  This is much faster than any other proprietary site based approach used anywhere else in racing, if a bit more free form.

YouTube is also increasingly ubiquitous.  Already, many can access YouTube on their televisions.  YouTube works on all major smartphones.  I have no idea if I can access any of racing’s proprietary replay sites on my phone, or on my TV, but I know I can access YouTube.  What’s more I know that YouTube will see to it that in five years everyone will be able to access YouTube, from any TV.  I know if racing used YouTube as a platform, and uploaded high def video I could watch replays on my smartphone, and on my 55″ flat screen in full blown 1080p.

Is that not just the sort of thing we should all be excited about, and falling all over ourselves to use?  Did I mention it’s free?  Racing has opportunities to do better with their use of APIs in other areas, such as tote odds, and hopefully, someday even charts and the like, but for now moving race replays over to a web platform that plays nicely with the rest of the web is an overdue development.

This is a guest post written by Raleigh, a  tech industry professional in Northern California.

Screenshot from equidaily.com

Posted in Industry.

By Dean
01/11/2010

5 comments