Marketing Racing
How can racing attract more young people to the sport? That question comes up in a couple of recent interviews, one with handicapper Rick Lang and the other with outgoing Thoroughbred Racing Association president Joe Harper. Spend an afternoon at any track on a typical day and it’s pretty clear that the industry needs to find ways to draw in more fans under 50. Harper suggests better marketing: “We need to reinvent how we present our product to the public in a way that is sexier and more appealing…. We haven’t been very good at doing that.” No, racing hasn’t done a very good job of presenting its product, which I find sad because I love the sport and wish that more people in their twenties and thirties followed the horses or even just thought spending an occasional day at the track was a fun thing to do and not an exotic adventure.
Creating and motivating new fans — especially among the young — isn’t impossible. The popularity of Smarty Jones and Funny Cide, and the success of “Seabiscuit” (book and movie), shows there’s a receptive audience. A good start to grabbing these people would be dumping the soft-focus hugging-yuppies surging-horses montage ads and coming out with an edgy or funny print and television campaign. Perhaps something like the Lori Petty ads of 1999, which didn’t last long, but which people still talk about, indicating they had some effect. Every ad could prominently display the URL of an extensive, attractive, and easy to use web site devoted to new and casual fans, with tutorials, special features, weekly chats, racing history, an events/stakes calendar, a children’s section, and some sort of loyalty program, among other things. And there’s so much more that could be done…. I’d love to see fresher advertising from individual tracks (Suffolk should toss out that ad it’s been using since forever), and more giveaway days, family days, live music, late post-times on Friday nights, beer gardens, handicapping seminars. Am I being wildly naive? It seems to me that with a little creativity and boldness racing could do so much to gain new fans.
