The Jockey Club, the company that owns Aintree, Epsom and Cheltenham horseracing venues, has entered into a technology partnership with programmatic media specialists RadiumOne to enable sponsors to target highly engaged horseracing fans across the entire web.
RadiumOne will take audience engagement data from The Jockey Club’s 15 racecourse websites and social media feeds – it owns Aintree (home of the Grand National), Epsom (home of the Derby) and Cheltenham (home of The Festival) – to help the club and its sponsors reach horseracing fans across the web.
“Sponsorship as a marketing discipline needs to be disrupted, particularly when it comes to digital activation which needs to be about more than logos on websites and email marketing lists”, said Abeed Janmohamed, RadiumOne’s Commercial Director. “It’s refreshing to see such a traditional, heritage brand as The Jockey Club embracing new digital marketing technologies, such as programmatic, to be the disruptor and solve this problem.”
The Jockey Club can now enable sponsors to reach a highly engaged digital audience of horseracing enthusiasts by fusing its own web audience data with people sharing and receiving its content via social widgets, and running this through RadiumOne’s programmatic data platform.
“Horse racing is the UK’s second biggest spectator sport but it’s an ongoing challenge to reach casual fans beyond betting environments”, said Tom Manners, The Jockey Club’s Group Sales and Marketing Director. “RadiumOne’s tech and data has helped identify over 3.5 million online profiles who’ve interacted at least five times with our content in some way over the last 90 days. This audience can be reached outside our digital channels, across the entire web.
“This is an extremely compelling offering for sponsors which didn’t exist before so, consequently, we can reflect this added value in our package pricing. Furthermore, the data, particularly from social sharing, has helped us to identify and reach new audiences for driving ticket and hospitality sales.”
In a three-month beta trial, The Jockey Club ran their marketing activity through RadiumOne’s data platform which resulted in an ROI of £11 in sales for every £1 spent programmatically. The trial also revealed that when a sponsor and The Jockey Club were included in the same ad, effectiveness doubled.