Numbers add up for racing industry as TAB channels evolve to engage sports fans
You learn early when you start putting your head on television that not everybody is going to like what you say.
No matter what you say or how you say it.
I started covering race meetings for Trackside 25 years ago, with zero training of any sort and the only real positive was that I spoke so fast nobody could really understand what I was saying so they had very little to be upset about.
Two years of speech lessons later and when people do actually get the drift of what you are saying, they make a point of telling you how bad or, very occasionally, good it is.
But always more bad than good. That’s just television.
The best lesson I learned about television presenting happened at a racing function.
An esteemed member of the 1000-win club stopped me and told me what I had said on a show a few nights earlier was complete rubbish and I should take it back on the next week’s show.
I walked three metres further and a Hall of Fame trainer stopped me, shook my hand and told me I couldn’t have been more right and to keep it up.
The lesson: on television you are never, ever going to make everybody happy.
Which is why sometimes facts help. We will get to those soon.
In the rapidly evolving world of betting in New Zealand, the TAB’s television channel Trackside is trying to walk the tightrope between keeping everybody happy, from 80-year-old racing diehards to 18-year-old sports fans who might open a Betcha account.
This is, of course, totally impossible because humans like what they like and don’t like what they don’t like.
Take one of Trackside’s newish television shows, Out The Gate, which started on Thursdays as a hybrid racing/sports/punting show and has since moved to Wednesday nights.
Thursday night harness and greyhound punters were used to long lead-ins, plenty of horses not doing much in preliminaries, and tips. It was meat-and-potatoes racing television and plenty of people like meat and potatoes.
But Out The Gate features interviews with sports people, commentators being bloke-at-the-pub casual, humour both good and bad and, most gallingly for traditionalists, the presenters jumping around like clowns and high-fiving when they back a winner for the viewers’ punters club, called a “Hosted Pot”.
Some people don’t like it.
But in reality, young (predominantly) men having a bet and then high-fiving and jumping around when they back a collective winner is how many punters under 30 actually like to enjoy racing.
The show mirrors the main target audience.
And just because presenters are given the licence to act like clowns doesn’t mean they are.
Host Guy Heveldt has done more serious television work than most racing presenters either side of the Tasman, while lead punter Brendan Popplewell virtually lives on racetracks.
And the “new kid” Mitch James is a muso so is used to playing up to a crowd and adds a different flavour, the sports fan learning about racing guy.
Which is the point.
TAB bosses realise they need to get more Kiwis betting on racing to make the numbers add up and the gateway to that for many is sport, through shows like Out The Gate or the new Thursday night offering Odds Squad, as well as sports odds dropped into the racing broadcasts along the way.
In the case of Out The Gate, it is working.
Both Wednesday and Thursday were in danger of becoming punting dead zones, especially as Saturday has become punting’s day of worship and Friday Night Lights is very much its primary harness focus.
By getting younger sports fans to watch Out The Gate or Odds Squad, which has had an impressive line-up of guests, they might convert them to betting on racing, which is basically how the whole racing economy is funded, albeit by an ageing audience.
Which brings us to the cold, hard facts about a show like Out The Gate from last season, whether some people like them or not:
** Total racing turnover during the Out The Gate shows was up 22%, compared with total racing up 6% during same period.
** Each race at a meeting within the Out The Gate timeslot attracting 12% more turnover than the year before.
** First time racing bets through Betcha on a Thursday night when Out The Gate was airing last season rose 22%; in contrast, first-time bets fell on other days of the week during that same 4.30-9pm timeslot.
So for whatever reason, most probably by making racing television entertaining on a previously quiet night, Out The Gate has helped make the racing industry more money.
The new shows do raise another question, though.
Have they put some more traditional punters off to the point they are going to change channels just because they don’t like the content between the races?
Punters being punters, probably not.
After all, people don’t stop watching the All Blacks or Warriors just because they might not like the commentators.
Racing bosses worldwide are infatuated with enticing new punters into the industry and for good reason, but that can risk alienating people who simply enjoy racing.
But racing and its channels also can’t stand still and not at least try new things.
And if not standing still means jumping around when you back a winner, that’s okay, because the serious racing, on Friday nights and Saturdays, still gets the serious treatment.
And, when it comes to television, especially racing television, you learn early you are never going to make everybody happy.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.