British racing's largest marketing campaign yet will launch May 20 under the title "The Going Is Good," with Simon Michaelides of Great British Racing declaring he was "incredibly confident" about what it can do for the sport.
The campaign, backed by £3,620,000 (approx. US$4,810,980) of funding from the Levy Board, will showcase British racing as a great day out, underpinned by the excitement of the sport, with the tagline "4 million memories made every year," a figure based on the sport's existing 4.8 million racegoers.
It comes three years after the sport's last marketing drive, the £1.6 million "Everyone's Turf" campaign featuring former footballer Jermaine Jenas, which was criticized for its lack of impact.
Michaelides said: "For the sport at large, this will be the biggest campaign we have done, more than double the spend of 'Everyone's Turf.'
"So that alone means it's going to reach a lot more people and have a much, much bigger impact, and now we have got the reassurance of knowing we have a really strong idea and advertising that is resonating really well with audiences."
Michaelides, who has led GBR since the departure of chief executive Rod Street last year, said the campaign was attempting to do two things.
"We're trying to get people who have never had a relationship with racing but who are open to it to really be inspired to come and find out more and want to engage with racing," he said.
"The other audience then really is casual fans who have either lapsed or are attending only once a year; we're really trying to inspire them to want to engage with the sport more often."
Michaelides said the confidence in the campaign was rooted in the testing and research that had been done around it, using an organization which tracks every advert launched in the United Kingdom and United States to benchmark it against.
He said: "It came out incredibly well, pretty much at the top end of the scale, and in my nearly 30 years in advertising and marketing I've rarely seen results like that, so we were extremely excited.
"It's way ahead of the average for sports events advertising, for example, way ahead of the average for TV advertising in general in the U.K., and about as close to the top end of the scoring range it could possibly get. So we're incredibly confident about what this has the potential to do for the sport."
The digital-first campaign, for which imagery is not yet available, will run across video-on-demand platforms, social media, and podcasts, as well as cinema, billboards, and radio, and will feature pictures captured on racedays, much of it by racegoers themselves.
The plan is to use the fans as "influencers," although Michaelides said that using social media influencers was also part of their thinking, including on the subject of welfare.
Around 20% of the new campaign will center on the issue of equine welfare, utilizing the sport's existing "HorsePWR" concept.
Michaelides said: "We've treated the campaign as if we were having a conversation with our audience. You can't ignore their questions about welfare, so we've baked that in."
GBR will report on the impact of the campaign at the end of the year, but Michaelides would not be drawn on putting a figure on what would constitute success.
He said: "This campaign is about raising the profile of British racing and raising that consideration to actually come and get involved in the sport, whether that's watching, whether that's attending.
"The most important thing around the success of the campaign is measuring that—are we raising profile and are we driving consideration among this target audience."
GBR worked on the development and delivery of the national campaign with the sport's commercial committee and the Racecourse Association and its members.
Acting British Horseracing Authority chair David Jones said: "GBR has worked in lockstep with industry stakeholders to develop what will be racing's biggest national campaign and its first in the last three years—testimony to the importance of the campaign is the level of support that it has."
