STUART S. JANNEY III: Last year, The Jockey Club Media Venture’s fan-development brand, America’s Best Racing, began working with digital marketing agency Branch & Bramble. Emily Lyman, CEO and founder of Branch & Bramble, will share with us the importance of using data to better market horse racing and help drive fans to the sport.

EMILY LYMAN: Hello. Thank you for the opportunity to sit down with you today, and thank you to Jim Gagliano, Stephen Panus, and the entire America’s Best Racing team for helping make this happen.

My agency, Branch & Bramble, has partnered with America’s Best Racing to strategically develop and implement a marketing program that introduces horse racing to a new, younger and diverse audience with an eye towards the growth and overall health of the sport.

In addition to our efforts to attract a new audience, we ultimately aim to work with ABR to protect the sport’s long-term reputation and ensure its future. It is about communicating differently, finding your people, meeting them where they are.

ABR’s active and engaged social media presence is amplified and bolstered by influencers and brand ambassadors. Live race-day shows offer second-screen entertainment and another way to highlight those influencers. We drive this content demand through paid advertising.

I know what’s going through your head: Emily, what does this have to do with the title of this talk, with zebras and hoof beats? Whenever there’s a problem, the simplest answer is almost always the solution. For the horse racing industry, our problem is figuring out how to appeal to new potential fans. Overall, horse racing relies on old tactics to promote the sport instead of listening to their feedback and seizing the opportunity to bring new, younger fans into the sport.

Currently the industry is hyper-focused on its own agenda, what you want to achieve this year, is it increasing handle, driving viewership, et cetera. And this manifests itself in elaborate content creation that is one-sided: We want to increase handle so we’re going to create more gambling initiatives with even more partners. We’re thinking our audience must want a zebra.

But it’s important to stop and ask ourselves: What is it that our audience actually wants? What does the audience that we’re hoping to attract want?

More often than not, they just want a horse. They don’t need an elaborate campaign. They just need their questions answered. But how do we know their questions? Enter social listening.

Social listening gathers all of those conversations across the web and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and the list goes on. Everything that is being said around keywords, hashtags, brand names, that comprehensive view allows us to uncover trends, gauge emotional responses to events, scandals, and heartwarming stories.

We’re able to paint a picture of what specifically people care about when it comes to the sport. Perhaps for us, it’s all about the handle, but for them, it’s about the treatment of the horse. We might be all about the race, but they are invested in the stories of the contenders. This data is meant to give us the tools to then create content around those audience touch points. It’s a balance. If we increase our content around aftercare, our audience is going to know that we hear them. Then they become more receptive to everything else that we promote.

So that’s the first part of social listening. The second is to confirm that what we are doing is actually working. We do this through public sentiment. Because the argument is if our content is resonating with our audience, overall they’re going to feel more positive about our brand.

Using a leading industry tool called Sprout Social, we ran a social media listening analysis on horse racing going back to 2018, specifically looking at how public sentiment has changed over these last three and a half years.

Additionally, within the sport as a whole, we pulled out specific brands and events. We wanted to find what causes changes in public sentient so that we can then better anticipate, respond to, and prevent potential obstacles.

Sprout Social pulls conversations from across the web and social media platforms. It monitors blog posts, news articles, status updates, and aggregates data around demographics such as age, gender, location, just to name a few.

And it’s not just about the volume, the number of posts. Although it does track that, it also calculates reach- how far did this conversation travel? And then, using machine learning, it can analyze each mention to pick up on that sentiment. Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it neutral?

Starting at the industry level, that purple bar, in 2018, positive public sentiment around horse racing stood at 75%. So of all the messages that contained a phrase, a hashtag, a brand name, et cetera, that revolved around the sport, 75% of those were either positive or neutral.

In 2019, that dipped to 71%. Slightly increased to 73% during COVID, and currently is hovering at 76%. It took two and a half years to bring public sentiment back up to 2018 levels. During this time period, handle also decreased year over year, losing three percentage points between 2018 and 2020.

The Kentucky Derby, visualized in green, which has built their own impressive brand, decreased 10 percentage points from 2019 when the winner was disqualified and has stayed relatively flat.

Looking at Santa Anita during 2019, positive public sentiment took a 44% dip. They rebounded back the next year because they took several very proactive and public steps towards changing public opinion. They launched protocol changes, made additional hires, advertising campaigns, et cetera, and they’ve since stayed at their rebounded levels.

Currently, 2021 public sentiments, overall, are holding steady, even increasing slightly in several areas. But when we zoom into the last four months of the year, we can see the fluctuations brought about by specific events. Not surprisingly, public sentiment for the industry took a significant hit in May.

At first glance, these charts are not alarming. But when you think about the efforts that are put forth every year, the Running Strong campaign, various paid advertising initiatives, partnership collaborations, all of this is just maintaining the status quo. And when you maintain the status quo of a contracting industry, it’s difficult to achieve growth.

ABR’s programs are fueled in part by social listening. We use monthly data to make future content recommendations and strategic decisions such as which articles to boost with paid spend, which influencers to bring in and amplify specific races.

On the flip side, we confirm that our marketing program is effective by keeping an eye on public sentiment. ABR’s listening metrics from 2018 to June of this year show that the brand has maintained a very high positive sentiment for the sport.

ABR’s live race-day shows offer a tailored second-screen experience that meets a young, modern audience where they are, an audience that has completely cut the cord. A significant portion of today’s content consumption now happens online, through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. It’s not through regular cable programming.

And not only do we know this from research and studies. We can see the individual platforms where conversations are taking place through the Sprout Social listening tool. For example, when we drill down into the data, we can see that YouTube has a very active audience around sports livestreams.

The fact that horse racing was able to bring the sport to viewers at home more quickly than others helped keep 2020 handle from decreasing significantly. In fact, it dipped less than 1% from 2019.

And integrated into these streams, along with showing races live, talking about gambling before and after to help fans bet from home, are those ABR influencers, some influencers that we sourced through social listening because we can see which conversations they are being part of and how they influence others. We have that tangible data.

In the end, these individuals trade the role of influencer for long-term Thoroughbred racing ambassador. No matter where these people are on their journey of cultivating a relationship with ABR and the sport, their storytelling and sharing of the world of horse racing through their unique lens opens up their followers to a new world that they might not otherwise have been exposed to.

With influencer audience sizes being different, depending on the individual, but the ways in which they’re able to connect with their audience are each valuable, and they play a pivotal role in telling the sports brand story across backgrounds, ethnicities and genders.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

So what are the tangible results, right? 80% of ABR’s social media following is now under the age of 44. Their Stay Lucky app audience, specifically when it comes to females, has increased by 4% over the last year, and their younger app demographic overall by 5%.

In total, their livestreams have garnered over 400,000 views just this year, and their influencers and brand ambassadors have reached 114 million people to date this year and generated over 680,000 engagements and video views combined.

These are ABR’s numbers, but they are building credibility and audience for the entire sport of Thoroughbred racing. Maintaining the status quo doesn’t protect a brand’s long-term health. Without growth in impressions and public sentiment, your key audience will eventually die out.

Listen to the values of your audience. It’s not just about what they’re saying, it’s about what matters to them on a deeply personal level. Social listening enables us to understand those personal values, incorporate them into our marketing and create lasting relationships with our audience.

STUART S. JANNEY III: Emily, that was very informative. It’s amazing what social media has done for horse racing. We need to meet our audience on these platforms and draw them in to become lifelong fans.