DAN SINGER: So joining us today to discuss these areas further, we have Chris Pollak from Google to talk about how innovative brands are using the power of digital, social and mobile to connect with their fans and engage with them in new ways.

Chris is the head of Sales Strategy & Operations for Google, before which he was the co-founder of legend entertainment in Hong Kong which introduced professional mixed martial arts to China, and he built a fan base of 18 million fans in just five years doing that.

I'll also note he's a former McKinsey colleague from about 10 years ago.

Just to note, the views Chris will express are his own and not necessarily Google's.

CHRIS POLLAK: Thanks, Dan. It's a huge honor to be here. One of my happiest childhood memories from when I was about 10 was being introduced to racing here by my father, who grew up in Schenectady. I won $20 in a trifecta and felt like a million bucks.

DAN SINGER: Winning $20 is pretty close to winning a million bucks on a trifecta, so well done.

Let's start with Legend. You started this organization I think straight out of McKinsey, which is very unusual.

CHRIS POLLAK: I did.

DAN SINGER: How did you manage to build a fan base so large in such a short amount of time?

CHRIS POLLAK: As Simon pointed out, our job as sports marketers is to give fans every opportunity to care about the sport and care about who wins. We started with a lot of television in mainland China, a lot of free -to -air. We worked with most every major sports network there.

But then we added to that a whole bunch of major partnerships, like QQ -- basically the major Chinese digital portals -- QQ, UQ, which is kind of a YouTube in China, Xin, and Tencent, which is a massive portal, which is like Yahoo! or AOL more than ten years ago.

And we would open up our doors to these guys and give them not just our content, but we'd invite them to the events, invite them backstage, we'd invite them to watch the athletes train in their hometowns. And they'd create interesting and unique stories and content around that, which generated enormous amounts of traffic.

We noticed that ring girls were actually one popular aspect of the sport.

DAN SINGER: You might have to explain what a ring girl is.

CHRIS POLLAK: Oh, ring girl? Just like in boxing, two women who walk in a square with the round numbers in between rounds. And we'd audition for these, and initially it was just in a gym somewhere, just a thing we did before each event. But there was a lot of interest in that and in that part of our website. So we invited a celebrity to judge them. We invited a major TV network to broadcast this, and it became a huge thing. We had the W Hotel sponsor it.

So we were constantly looking for other ways for people to get involved and care about the sport through other interests they might have.

DAN SINGER: What was the role of TV in those early days of Legend?

CHRIS POLLAK: The role of TV?

DAN SINGER: Yeah. You talked a bit about pay-per-view versus broadcast. Was it a big way to develop fans, or was it mainly digital?

CHRIS POLLAK: Well, TV was the foundation for reach for sure, especially in mainland China, we're on the free-to-air networks. We did a lot of international broadcasts. I mentioned to you over breakfast that we actually did the first-ever pay-per-view out of China to the U.S., which was a lot of fun making history.

DAN SINGER: This may make us feel better about HD and racing. What was the infrastructure for television like when you started?

CHRIS POLLAK: It was horrible. We had to ship in a lot of gear from New Zealand and even England once to get the slow-mo replay machine, the EVS machine. So there were always a lot of technical challenges. And we had a really good production crew. We invested in high-end content to make this stuff super appealing because a lot of people had never seen MMA before.

DAN SINGER: Let's cut over to your experience at Google and your experience as a digital marketer, marketer of data, manager and so on. Starting with content, how do successful sports, successful entertainment companies, even successful brands, how do they create content for YouTube but also Facebook and Twitter and Snap and Instagram? So many different platforms. How do you create content that people actually want to engage in?

CHRIS POLLAK: I think you have to really understand your audience and keep track of what they find interesting. I think you made a lot of good points earlier on that front in terms of what other major professional sports organizations are doing.

Digital video is different than television. It's mostly people watching on their mobile. It's a totally different type of screen. They're frequently watching it while they're also watching television. And they're often looking for other things. They're looking to engage in a sport in other ways than they would with whatever they're seeing on a main broadcast.

So, for example, on YouTube and Google, the Olympics are a huge source of traffic. A lot of people go to YouTube to watch parts of the Olympics. They're not necessarily watching the major events because a lot of stuff is televised. Like the Olympics a few years back, the biggest spikes in traffic were around videos about Sochi -- village tours, the condition of the courses and of the sports before the actual events. The sexiest Olympic athletes was a really big video. And there were actually a couple ads from P&G and Visa that went viral, just like Super Bowl ads where people would go to watch the ads again online.

DAN SINGER: You mentioned that we should pay attention to what works, what our fans like in the traditional world. And you'll see statistics today and see some research we do on racing fans, it's hard. We're doing surveys of fairly large -- it's hard to capture that kind of insight. What can we do now with Google and other platforms to understand what fans like, don't like, engagement? How does it help us get much more precise as marketers?

CHRIS POLLAK: Yeah, one of the things you can do with technology, basically Google can help you understand a full footprint of somebody digitally. They understand what websites you may have been visiting. They understand YouTube or other videos you've watched. They understand things you may have purchased or think about purchasing. They can actually predict whether you're likely to get married or have other life events.

DAN SINGER: Am I likely to get married?

CHRIS POLLAK: You seem to already be successfully married, but they probably know that.

DAN SINGER: Yeah, I think maybe you're being a little bit modest, but if we think about the assets that Google has between Chrome Browser, Search, YouTube, Maps, is there anything you don't know about me?

CHRIS POLLAK: I hope so, personally.

DAN SINGER: Thanks, appreciate that. Always good to have colleagues up here. But I think the amount of precision that you have, most people don't realize exactly how precise. If we said we want to know something about racing fans, how detailed could you get through Google data and segmenting out different kinds of race fans?

CHRIS POLLAK: Lately very detailed. This is one of the most powerful things about digital footprints, because a fan base tends to be more than one type of person. It tends to be a handful of very different segments. It could be -- so for any given brand, we can parse that out into a segment like women shopaholics that love figure skating and another one, also, in addition to whatever your brand or your sport is. Another one might be men that like BMX and golf.

But these might be two segments that actually engage over the same brand. Sometimes it's a surprise to advertisers. Like Budweiser came out with a new drink a few years back called Lime-a-Rita. Typically, a beer brand might advertise -- their first thought might be our audience is probably going to be men. That's traditionally where they've gone with their advertising. But doing some audience segment research, they found this actually resonated very well with women, and they developed a campaign. But they segmented that out to many different types of segments, even within that demo. They created -- they basically used this thing called Director Mix where you can supply assets to the computers that will create custom ads.

DAN SINGER: When you say "assets," you mean?

CHRIS POLLAK: Instead of shooting a regular TV commercial or a six- or 15-second ad and putting it on digital, you can have a background, you can have a foreground, you can have the product, these are separate pieces of information, and the computer will create a custom ad based on what it knows about that person, the second they're clicking on a web page, and give them that ad that speaks to them based on whatever they're interested in.

You can actually change the flavor of the drink that's in the ad. They have watermelon, they have lime. So these are unique things that you can do digitally by really understanding your audience and breaking it down to very specific segments of their interest and then speaking to them nearly one to one based on what those interests are.

DAN SINGER: Suppose racing had video on YouTube that was a very exciting race moment or a star horse. How could we tell if people who had seen that video ended up going to a track within some reasonable period of time? Could we know that through Google?

CHRIS POLLAK: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things you could do is you could market. You have a huge moment like that and you could market to those people or remarket to those people. Google would know they've been there. You don't need to know their email address necessarily at that point. You just know they've watched that YouTube video. You could remarket to that audience, then you could measure whether or not they went to the track based on Google Maps data.

DAN SINGER: How do you know through Google Maps data if I've been to the track?

CHRIS POLLAK: Every time you get a new mobile phone, you may notice you download a few apps and it asks some permissions, especially now after the whole GDPR thing in Europe. You have to basically give permissions to know where you are.

So if I watch that YouTube video and I'm marketed to come here to Saratoga Springs and I come, Google knows that I came here through my phone's location data. They can actually extrapolate that to statistics to people who haven't opted in, and they follow up with surveys to make sure the statistics are accurate. So this is a fairly good tool when your objective is to bring somebody to a specific location. It's a fantastic tool to do that.

DAN SINGER: I just want to come back to the point you made before, or I think you made before, which is as we succeed in creating content -- video, photos, text even -- that resonates particularly with casual fans, younger fans, people we want to attract, we don't automatically get any precise data on who they are, if it's on Google, Facebook or others, right?

CHRIS POLLAK: That's right.

DAN SINGER: I think Mike mentioned earlier that NBA uses a pitch that you should vote for All-Stars, because when people vote for All-Stars, it takes them back to NBA.com, and there they can get an email address, a favorite team. Is that routinely done? It seems to work for NBA All-Star, but for racing or other Google content advertisers, how hard is it to get someone to click on something and get off of your platform so we can find out their email address and market them later?

CHRIS POLLAK: If it's highly relevant and based on their interests and customized for who they are and what they're looking for at that moment, then that's when it works the best. In that case, my advice would be to steer them to a website or a place where they can engage with a brand and you can get their information.

DAN SINGER: You have some connection to racing, lifelong. If you were marketing racing through all these digital means, what would be your top priority? What would be the couple things you would absolutely want to do?

CHRIS POLLAK: I definitely want to really understand who my audience is as well as I can and, in a very detailed, segmented level, what they're interested in. I would think about reaching them in moments that matter, assist them when they're looking for something, like what should I wear to the track today or other moments like that, what is the background of Southern Phantom, which is a thing I looked up yesterday because there was an article in The New York Times, and meet them there.

I would say also be authentic. These are some of the things that worked well for YouTube creators. Create a huge audience, be authentic, be consistent. Experiment and learn is a point Mike made, and I think you have to do that relentlessly every day, fast. Also be really specific on what your objectives are, which I think Simon had some very specific ones for the U.K., and I thought that made a lot of sense in this.

DAN SINGER: Just staying with your point about YouTube creators, in the TV world, which remains important, we think of production budgets on the order of 100,000 an hour or more. We think of producers, directors, on-air talent, locations. Get us in the head of a YouTube creator. What does it cost? We're talking about people with potentially millions of viewers or subscribers on YouTube. Is it $100,000 an hour on YouTube?

CHRIS POLLAK: I would be surprised. Maybe somebody has done it. It tends to be people out of their bedrooms. Even when they're hugely successful and making millions of dollars a year creating this stuff, it's still they're making it out of their bedrooms in a lot of cases. Especially gamers, which is a huge type of content on YouTube.

In sports, Dude Perfect is one of my favorite sports channels, which is five guys and a panda that are kind of funny and also do a lot of trick shots. They get these videos sponsored, and so sometimes they do pretty elaborate things where they'll go out and rent out a BMX track or create these -- I can't remember what these machines are called, but you push a marble and it goes through a hundred steps and eventually --

DAN SINGER: It's a Rube Goldberg machine.

CHRIS POLLAK: So they've created some extremely elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. If anyone's interested in Rube Goldberg machines, I highly recommend this channel, Dude Perfect. You'll be amazed.

So that stuff is maybe on the expensive side, but I doubt even then they'd pay anything close to $100,000. It's more about the authenticity of that voice. Fans are looking for something differenton YouTube. TV is high production budgets. TV seems to be different.

DAN SINGER: For time reasons, I think we're going to have to conclude, but I had one last question for you, Chris. I understand you have a connection to Jason Wilson, the president of Equibase. Could you tell us about that?

CHRIS POLLAK: Yeah. Hey, Jason. Jason and I played rugby together at Columbia Business School, and I also helped carry Jason off the field when he broke his leg at a big rugby tournament years, years back.

DAN SINGER: So another excellent contribution to racing by you there, so thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Chris. We appreciate you coming.

CHRIS POLLAK: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.