Harness: Marketing and the Pennsylvania budget issue

Apparently the sky is falling once again. That’s right, the always rocky three-way marriage between racetracks, casinos and government received a blow when Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf unveiled his state budget calling for a $200 million hit to the state’s horse racing industry.

The immediate reaction on social media was a mix of fear and calls to action.

The fears are warranted to some extent considering how often we’ve heard the word decoupling when it comes to casino revenue and racetracks. As we all know, Pompano Park could be on its last legs in 2020 as ownership looks to remove pari-mutuel harness racing from Florida.

Calls to action are great if they are followed by actual action. Perennial leading driver Yannick Gingras took to social media and wrote about the need for horsemen to support the industry themselves. “…Racetracks have little to no incentives to do it (market the sport) for us and at best we could get some of them to match our efforts, but I wouldn’t wait for them and I’d start worrying about what WE can do and not what we think they should do.”

Gingras called for a 5% minimum amount to be pulled from the purse accounts to market the sport. He cited that most major companies spend a lot more than 5% to promote their brands. Gingras concluded by saying, “At the end of the day we need to stop waiting for help and blaming others and take care of ourselves.”

Recent Hall of Fame inductee Tim Tetrick agreed with his fellow top driver. “…Get a budget together and get marketing firms out to see who will best fit the needs of our insiders. We need innovation, videography, and great content creation. Our sport has so many incredible aspects, we need to share it or we are in trouble.”

I applaud both Gingras and Tetrick for speaking out about the need to move the sport forward. The bottom line is that this is not the first time either man has relayed those thoughts and here we are years later in the same situation. Calls to action are wonderful and can get the ball moving, but in our case we are talking about a boulder and the only way to move it is if both men walk into the paddock and grab all of their fellow horsemen and they push really hard.

It won’t be easy to convince everyone in the room that money needs to be pushed towards marketing. Let’s face it, if a trainer or driver races for an average purse of $10,000 and they finish in the top-three positions 250 times each in a year, they will be donating over $5,000 a year to the fund. And the owners are paying up as well. Using the same $10,000 purse, an owner whose horses lose 5% from 20 wins, places and shows in a year will be out about $8,000.

I’ve listened to the pro and con arguments in the past on using purse account money to market the sport. The majority of times it comes down to the lack of a clear plan. The horsemen want to know where the money is going before they commit, which makes common sense, but in many ways it isn’t logical.

Let’s face it, many of the participants in the sport, whether racetracks, owners, trainers, drivers or whatever, aren’t marketers. They don’t have the knowledge necessary to formulate a plan for the industry as a whole when it comes to promotion. Sure, some racetracks have great marketing and promotion locally, but this needs to be a more of a one-voice type message.

It’s a ‘What came first the chicken or the egg’ scenario. We need a plan to move forward but we need to hire a professional firm that knows how to market in order to develop a plan.

Whether you agree that marketing the sport will help or not is a completely different issue. There are many voices that feel we must fix the sport before we market it. These people point to takeout being too high among other problems that need to be addressed. Perhaps they are right, but perhaps we need to get the message out first, increase our audience, and then fixing any issues will be more viable. Again, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

While the news of the proposed Pennsylvania budget is certainly troublesome, it is hardly shocking. The best message I saw came from USTA President Russell Williams. He cited the need to be calm in the face of the announcement.

Williams is right. The industry has faced serious issues many times and persevered. The PA situation is hardly a fatal wound at this point. It is more of a reminder that the fight for survival never ends. We must not panic, but as I’ve written over and over and over and over and over again, the entire industry, top to bottom, need to work together to ensure the best possible future for the sport we love.