Racing should expect more innovative promotion than flogging itself through celebrity

Liz Taylor was the first actor to ever get a million dollars for a film. It was for the bloated epic Cleopatra that came out 60 years ago.

Taylor justified her gigantic fee with a line much more memorable than anything in the movie – “If someone’s dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I’m certainly not dumb enough to turn it down”.

So, on a similar basis, it’s easy to see why RTÉ's presenter and influencer Doireann Garrihy pocketed over €27,000 from Horse Racing Ireland last year in return for plugging the sport to her hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

It’s even not difficult to imagine the HRI brainstorm that came up with the idea. If the brief is to spread racing’s gospel to new audiences, then tapping into the sort of attention-seeking that was once considered unattractive but is now the culture probably made some sort of sense.

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Even the bit pounced on by Catherine Murphy – the €13,000 paid to Garrihy for promoting a race meeting in another jurisdiction – is hardly as staggering as the Social Democrat TD made out in the Dáil earlier this year.

It’s an incongruity, but still a reality, that Irish racing’s biggest race meeting of the year takes place on the side of a hill in Gloucestershire. There is commercial logic to HRI’s justification about Cheltenham being racing’s “greatest customer acquisition opportunity of the year”.

Officials at the semi-State are still sore about having got dragged into the frenzy surrounding RTÉ spending through their use of Garrihy. They insist too that they will continue to pursue this kind of promotional strategy.

Such content, they argue, “allows Horse Racing Ireland build its digital media following across Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to promote and sell tickets to Irish festivals and race meetings. HRI’s following across all of these channels grew exponentially on the back of this content and provided real value for money for the promotion of Irish racing”.

It sounds fancy but strip the “morkoting” jargon from these e-bells and whistles and it’s an analogue strategy of hitching the horsebox to an RTÉ “personality” in the desperate hope enough supposed glitz reflects onto the sport. It hardly cuts the mustard in terms of supposed cutting edge.

HRI has plenty form with this ploy. Hector Ó hEochagáin spent years buck-leaping across screens demanding we let ourselves go. It has also hitched its horsebox to the 2 Johnnies. In all cases it’s easy to suspect the medium wound up more obviously successful than the message.

Too much of it is symptomatic of a chronic lack of self-confidence in selling racing on its own merits. Rather than pushing the sport for what it is has to offer, there’s a promotional instinct to push what it isn’t rather than what it is.

So, you get ad campaigns barely featuring a horse or jockey, instead focusing on little more than gimmickry to try to encourage people to pay attention to it. No other major sport gives off such a needy vibe, and by its very definition it is counterproductive. Trying too hard is never attractive.

It isn’t just Irish racing that’s prone to such insecurity. In fact, the nadir of this pursuit for outside validation probably came in Britain when the build-up to the 2016 Cheltenham Festival was dominated by a ‘switching saddles’ gimmick surrounding the former Olympic cyclist, Victoria Pendleton.

Backed by a betting conglomerate, the pitch was Pendleton would learn how to race-ride in time to compete at the festival in the biggest amateur prize of the year, the Hunters Chase.

The cross-channel authorities played ball with an enthusiasm that amounted to a tacit admission of insufficient faith in its own greatest annual attraction not being enough to attract sufficient public attention.

Apparently, what Cheltenham really needed to sell itself wasn’t the Gold Cup but a publicity stunt involving a bored ex-cyclist.

There’s nothing wrong with a sport playing around with a touch of celebrity glamour now and again. Sometimes it can deliver some unintentionally funny results such as Martin Brundle’s “I’m sure it would have been extremely interesting” flounce with model Cara Delevingne at last weekend’s British Grand Prix, but it’s a frippery in F1′s scheme of things.

The sums being ponied up to social media influencers aren’t insignificant in the context of Irish racing’s efforts to develop profile amongst a floating public audience.

Rather than flogging itself through celebrity however, better value for money might be had if the sport sold itself for what it is rather than through what some digital attention-seeker is paid to say.

Expecting people to turn down money for old rope is expecting way too much. But racing should also expect fresher and innovative pitches to the public than forking out like this for any old ‘star’ system.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND

The weekend starts on Friday evening with a pair of very different six-figure prizes within a few minutes of each other.

Longchamp’s €600,000 Group One Bastille Day feature is the Grand Prix de Paris live on Sky featuring the supplemented Oaks winner Soul Sister and Aidan O’Brien’s Irish Derby runner-up Adelaide River.

Another Coolmore-owned hope allowed take a shot is the Andre Fabre-trained First Minister (7.52) He looks value at about 7-1 to reverse early season form with Feed The Flame and underline the strength of France’s three-year-olds. It doesn’t hurt that Fabre has won the race 13 times.

Kilbeggan’s €100,000 Midlands Nationals line-up includes the JP McManus-owned bottom-weight Stealthy Tom (7.55) who is on a hat-trick after wins at Killarney and Roscommon. Mark McDonagh’s 5lb claim could prove crucial at the end.