The focus of this panel, began moderator Greg Blanchard, is to try and identify why harness racing doesn't seem to appeal to the younger generation, and how we can package and promote our product to gain that appeal.
Each member of the diverse panel gave an individual presentation, beginning with Meghan Warby, senior consultant with Hill and Knowlton. She started off by admitting she knows little, if anything all, about horse racing. "It's a very mysterious, masculine, traditional if not classy, older entertainment genre," she joked. "I think of Mint Julep, Julia Roberts and the Rat Pack."
Her conversation, instead, focused on Generation Y -- who are they, what do they want and how do we reach them?
Warby offered the example of the most recent Canadian Club advertising campaign, the themes of which resonate well, she argued, with Generation Y. But why and how does it do so?
Who is Generation Y? These are children that are born in 1980 and later, she said. They belong to some of the smallest families we've ever seen, receive quite a bit of positive encouragement whether they've deserved it or not, and they have been completely socialized with computers.
The four primary values of communicating with these youth, she pointed out, are immediacy (yes, it matters), communication (they need to be talked to in their language and assured that their peers would understand), personalization (they need the ability to customize -- there needs to be a strong emphasis on individualization and personalization), and, finally, they need to see interactivity. When they consume something, the want to share something, talk about it with their friends.
So why does social media -- think Facebook -- appeal to Gen. Y? It appeals to all these things and it's about a conversation.
It was a great lead in to the presentation of Dean Towers, director of Client Services, Page Zero, which took those social networking ideas and applied them specifically to horseracing. "Marketing something new to these people is tough," he admitted. "Mass marketing doesn't necessarily reach them -- you'll see many different ROIs across many different landscapes. Different things work in different areas. In racing, gaming and skill games -- a $700 billion market -- we need to give people an alternative way to bet."
One way you can do it, said Towers, is with something like a tote-scraping program. "It's a user-based program that you can create yourself. When you create something yourself, you own it, you are in charge of it."
Alluding to both this program and an online service called TwinSpires TV, Towers talked specifically to the future capacity of data storage and the opportunities available to covert horse racing to a more attainable platform for Generation Y.
Originally at Nortel, the third and final panelist Dave Vicary, CEO of Weyes Eyes Inc., left and started his own business, selling software to the world's largest companies. He then launched yet another company, Weyes Eyes, which now focuses on delivering video intelligence and surveillance to consumers. He claimed his first horse in 2003 and since then has developed new software to help him handicap the races -- a smart, learning software that shows him what is importance.
"There are two things I believe in," he began. "The first is simplicity -- which is absolutely necessary -- and the second serendipity."
In short, he said, you've got to get the gamers.
Who are the gamers and what do they want? It's huge and growing demographic, stresses Vicary. A product for them has to be online, it has to offer immediate gratification, there has to be no learning curve, there must be small transactions available, and there must be accounts available -- they have to be able to play now and pay later.
"Micro business is big business," he said. "That's where all the money is being made -- small transactions over and over from a large audience."
Vicary went on to break down the sort of ideal product components that we already have. We have live streaming video, which con provide immediate gratification. We have wealth of information and historical data. We need to marry in some sort of artificial intelligence, he says, to make the information much more useable -- avoiding the need for these new comers to need to learn to read a program. This data could provide horse/trainer/driver highlights and more accurate probabilities.
Finally, we have, or could have, video analytics, Vicary suggested. There exists the ability today to detect what's happening in any video -- and this is information that could provide far more value than flat data from a program.
So what could this dream product look like? The kind of product that could really grab Gen Y? In a nutshell, said Vicary, it's available online or on a PDA, it has advanced capabilities to sort and bet, it has past performance highlights, overlay alerts, and last-race video highlights. It must be a simple, helpful interface that is helpful, not a hindrance.
And what are the advantages of this? There are plenty, suggested Vicary. It can network communities, it is a high quality of information, and it offers a strong competitive edge against off-shore sites.
"You need to tell a compelling story to younger people and it needs to be a personal experience," stressed Warby. "The real point, where a group of young people decided to spend a night at the races -- what will make them make that decision? You really need to start developing an experience. It's about reframing the experience of going to the racetrack and being true to the values of the industry while making it palatable to a younger audience."
If you were to make a recommendation to racetrack owners, asked Blanchard, what would it be?
"Well, the other thing we haven't talked about," responded Vicary, "the moose on the table, is that whenever I mention harness racing to anyone, they say: 'oh, they cheat over there.' If the track owners and Standardbred Canada can cooperate and put forth a standard Canadian product, they can get a leg up on that."
"You know, it's not about money," Warby suggested. "It's about the experience and about being social. Once you reposition what it means to go the races, you'll have a really compelling story."
When asked if it she felt that racing in general had a negative perception in the eyes of youth, Warby's response was enlightening.
"I would say there is actually a lack of perception -- it's just a non-concept. It's just never been optioned to me as an entertainment option."