Racing's uncertain marketing schemes should target its spending more efficiently

The history of Thoroughbred racing's benighted attempts to market itself is horrific.

In Victorian America, the aristocratic lords of racing in New York set a pretty high standard of negative marketing for their successors to match, and, sad to say, racing's marketing efforts in the 20th century quite possibly exceeded that ineffectual standard.

America's racing aristocrats of the late 19th century were a highly paternalistic bunch. When they built their racing palaces at Jerome Park, Morris Park, and later Belmont Park, they quite purposely made admission fees high because they felt that the common working man could not afford to gamble and thus should not be encouraged to attend.

Politicians—many of them from that same class of Puritan-minded aristocrats—agreed. By 1910, they shut down Thoroughbred racing virtually nationwide and outlawed every form of gambling.

After racing resumed in 1913 and Thoroughbred racing found itself virtually the only legal means to gamble in the United States, the leaders of the sport, wealthy bankers and investors such as the Belmonts, Woodwards, and Wideners, saw no reason to change their philosophy.

For gamblers, racing was the only game in town—or at least the only legal game in any town other than Las Vegas. So, despite the relatively high price of admission, parking, food, etc. that racing charged, fans flocked to racetracks for decades.

During the heyday of racing, nearly every major metropolitan daily newspaper employed a Turf writer, while the sport section agate pages carried race results of the local track and from some major tracks around the country. It was easy for racing fans to find information about the sport and racing's leaders did not need to pay anyone to distribute that information. Racing received the world's best advertising—newspaper coverage.

But racing refused to embrace television—that newfangled device.

When television changed America's leisure habits in the 1960s and '70s, the popularity of professional football, basketball, hockey, and a lot of minor sports increased, cutting into racing's popularity. Coincidentally, gambling laws changed in a majority of states, creating competitive gambling alternatives such as the lottery, reducing further the interest in the sport by marginal fans only interested in betting.

What was racing's response to these changes? The industry largely ignored them.

But the enormity of the changes and the deterioration of racing's percentage of the legal wagering dollar were so dramatic that eventually racing had to respond. Racing interests formed the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, whose primary mission is to market Thoroughbred racing in this competitive new world.

The NTRA's first attempts at changing racing's image, the "Go, Baby, Go" series of commercials featuring actress Lori Petty, were edgy, insistent, effective, and totally unacceptable to the grandsons of the Victorian aristocrats who set the tone for American Thoroughbred racing more than a century ago. The NTRA canned that series, tried another quirky but incomprehensible approach—which was also hooted down by the establishment—and then retreated into safe, predictable, utterly boring, ineffectual ads.

A recent breakfast shared with a prospective newcomer to Thoroughbred racing focused the author's attention on the thought that, regardless of how good or bad any NTRA television commercials might be, Thoroughbred racing is trying to market itself in the wrong way. Television commercials are very much like direct marketing mass mailings, thrown over the transom of people's lives that often land in the trashcan of their attention span.

The key to successful marketing is targeting the audience you want to reach. The NTRA has stated it wants to reach younger Americans who are already sports fans. So, who actually controls access to these young sports fans? News editors and sports editors of major metropolitan broadcast and print media.

That gentleman at breakfast made his fortune by founding one of the few Internet sites that has been profitable almost from its inception. He knows a thing or two about marketing. When the author—as we are often apt to do—offered his opinion that racing does not have a clue how to market itself effectively, the newcomer agreed. The problem, he said, is not the target, but the route we take to reach it.

NTRA is already trying to sell racing programs to ESPN, CNBC, and other networks. They should go a step further. Some of the $15-million NTRA spent on advertising should go toward "fellowships" or grants to sports networks and major metropolitan daily newspapers, with an annual amount neatly equaling a respectable salary targeted for someone specifically to cover Thoroughbred racing.

If racing could get such a program initiated, it would help return the sport to the national spotlight. Thoroughbred racing would reach far more of the young, potentially interested sports fans than it could ever reach with mindless commercials.

Can you imagine a five-minute segment on ESPN's "SportsCenter" every night devoted to Thoroughbred racing?

I can.

And what about the Internet? Many racing entities, including Thoroughbred Times, NTRA, Breeders' Cup Ltd., and Daily Racing Form have constructed extensive Web sites that serve existing fans, but what do they do to expand racing's fan base? Where is Thoroughbred racing's icon on the America Online home page or on its sports home page? The sports home page at Microsoft Network, the second-largest Internet portal, does have a link to MSNBC's horse racing coverage, but there is nothing at Earthlink, the number three site, and nothing at Yahoo.

Television commercials are a first step—at least they would be if they were any good and if they appeared on programs other than those already watched by existing racing fans—but they are not the only thing Thoroughbred racing should be doing to market itself in the brave new world of the 21st century.

Racing missed the marketing and media revolutions of the 20th century. Let's not allow history to repeat itself in the 21st.