Personally speaking, I am tired of all these conversations about AI, the Crypto market and loathe the word “turnover” just as much as I dislike the term known as “the punt”. We’re talking about horses for courses here, and while in the city and reading about a decline in, er, turnover after the first few meetings of the new racing season, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which is a charitable organisation, needs to actually be SEEN as being one- not through a press release, but th

It’s tough for a hard nosed and longtime advertising and marketing person to be dismissive about most of Hong Kong’s advertising and marketing efforts, but it sure doesn’t look as if David Ogilviy and Bill Bernbach or Don Draper were involved. Most of the “Love Racing” standard of communications is not only of a certain bog level, it almost always comes across as “creative by committee”- something thrown out there into the online world with nary a thought about the consumer.

After months away from the venue mainly because of not being in Hong Kong, I met up with a group of friends to discuss an idea I have to re-energise the city and create something holistically creative and interactive instead of another round of irrelevant bibs and bobs seemingly produced by some local kindergarten. This upmarket venue was once the most popular six star restaurant in a five star hotel- beautiful people, great drinks and snacks etc. Yesterday, I discovered ther

Earlier this week, I sent a registered letter to the Chief Executive of Hong Kong- John KS Lee. In case you were wondering or concerned, there was nothing Dylanesque in it and with no obscure observations of life and love based on the Eraserheaded Twin Peaks thinking of David Lynch. The letter was primarily to thank Mr Lee for ensuring that the city remains relatively safe, and also saying that Hong Kong desperately needs to upgrade its standards of practically everything in

With the expected resignation of PVL as head of Racing New Wales after 22 years in the job to become Executive Chairman of the Australian NRL being headline news in Australia, no one can say that Peter V’Landys didn’t read the tea leaves about a decade earlier and saw an industry kept alive on history with time slipping into a future where not all will survive. Leading and running with the NRL ball takes Peter V’Landys to a different zenith in a major part of the global sport

Jimmy Ruffin asked in song “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted?” which had me prompting the question, “What Becomes Of The Has-Beens?”or worse, “What Becomes Of The Never-Beens?” These are all seemingly very valid questions that come flooding to mind when perhaps wistfully wondering how a fraud and felon rebuilt his brand personality pock marks to be voted in TWICE as the President of the United States and SURVIVE despite lying, being utterly incompetent and geographically ch

https://racingbitch.wordpress.com/2017/10/14/hong-kong-horse-racing-what-a-long-and-strange-ride-its-been/ Of course, I was much younger at the time and had only been in Hong Kong for about a year and privileged to be attending Quarry Bay Primary School despite my parents not having jobs. I remember taking the Shaukiwan tram every day from the cubbyhole we lived in on the 27th floor of a high rise called Fung Wah Mansion that was hardly a mansion. I was the first dark skinned

We can put on a happy face, maybe we can have an hour of happiness, but imagine- and imagine is such an important word- being able to constantly be inspired- and perhaps even more importantly, to be inspiring! I don’t like using exclamation marks, but I’ve used it in the earlier sentence to emphasise urgency, excitement and a call to action! There! I’ve made another exclamation mark! Here’s someone who started out in advertising and was so happily inspired watching “E.T”. I l

No idea who’s been handing out the Valium, but in all the many decades that I’ve been part of Hong Kong, watching it go through its many ch-ch-ch-changes after arriving here by ship from Ceylon with my parents and told we were in Melbourne- long story- and going from being the first “wog” at Quarry Bay Primary School to the united nations that was King George the Fifth Secondary School, and then worked on those different fillings that make up why Life’s Like A Cheeseburger, n

We hadn’t seen each other for over ten years and much can happen in this time, something you don’t deep dive and find on social media- and how we only really reconnect by meeting people face to face, and making up for lost time with eye contact and words and not emojis. Evie is someone unique- a Mandarin and Hindi speaking Scandinavian with a brilliant mind who saw Roger Ailes win over Rupert Murdoch and create Fox News who is now in her early fifties, knows the worlds of pol

“No idea about them being Butch and Sundance, but I see this team being more like ‘Young Frankenstein” with weird love oozing out of every pore!” It was another Wednesday night of rather drab low class racing at Happy Valley and our friend visiting from overseas insisted on taking in the Happy Valley horse races “for old times sake”. She had declared the night before that the Whyte-Purton combination would win the fourth and fifth races- and they did- and how there was someth

The entire racing world loves Saffie Osborne, because, not only did she playfully call Matt Chapman an idiot for saying that Highwayman had no chance of winning the St Leger Stakes at Doncaster- I like Matt very much- she also didn’t just break the glass ceiling, she brought down the entire roof by becoming the first woman rider to win a British classic race. This incredible feat has, quite rightly, become a mantra in the racing world- and this also is something not without i

What made Hong Kong “Asia’s world city” was its marketing strategy of being positioned as the international host to the world as opposed to going in Reverse and returning to the rather hackneyed “Only in Hong Kong”. The Hong Kong that most of the world will always remember is “Asia’s world city, something, by the way, that the late Tung Chee Hwa, the finest and most popular Chief Executive that Hong Kong has had always emphasised starting in 1999. On the subject of an interna

It is what it was and if few cared if it exuded some sort of excitement and a little bit of pizazz, but not the same old pizza with the usual toppings, the opening of the new Hong Kong racing season last week seemed to go through the motions and retreated into an empty shell of ancient corporate clichés. Despite the tendency these days in Hong Kong for the tedious mentioning by different groups and the government about the usual five year and ten year plans when we all know t

At least to me, Ka Ying Rising transcends being another champion galloper, and the challenge for the Hong Kong Jockey Club is to understand that this is 2026, Hong Kong is no longer seen by the world as “Asia’s World City”, and for communications to matter, this needs to be more than TikTok moments on X and some content on a website. Communications- effective communications- is more important than ever before, often because of so much clutter hiding life priorities, and I oft

I was born in Colombo when Sri Lanka was a British colony known as Ceylon. My family were Burghers who insisted on being known as DUTCH Burghers which meant nothing to me at the time. I might as well have been called a Cheeseburger, but it was what it was just as these days, it is what it isn’t. As a kid growing up in Ceylon, my days were made up of digging for earthworms and being mollycoddled by Podi, a dear, sweet Singhalese lady who looked after me. Her younger sister Ali

When working with EMI Music and very close to the Toshiba-EMI team and pretty familiar with Japanese artists like Utada Hikaru, below, and makeup bands Glay and Spitz, I remember telling my team about a French jockey riding in the land of the rising sun who was the whole package to be an “idol jockey”. Mickaelle Michel also had the potential to become a pop star in Japan who could record in French and Japanese and maybe even create something unique and bilingual, musically. W

When there was a music industry, it was always summertime, living was easy, we travelled everywhere in primo class and used company ka-ching to try out the latest hotels and clubs and restaurants and were never short of companionship. Whether with Sony, Universal, EMI etc, we’d swan around wherever in the world that the Les Grande Fromage wanted to go and make an appearance and a presentation and then make plans for a Wolf Of Wall Street night. Knowing that all expenses were

Having started out in advertising before the online world came into being and helping to launch McDonald’s in Hong Kong when Director of Creative Services with DDB before running the regional offices of Universal and then EMI Music with Norman Cheng, below, and seeing streaming services and algorithms take over the magic of music, one learns how numbers, research and Human Resources can be the enemy of creativity that’s borne out of being intuitive. This was when karma came i

Over the years, though knowing the answer would be a big fat NO, probably just to annoy me, I have been asked the same old question by two of the three women who have lived with me collectively and separately for almost four decades and know me better than anyone else: “Babe, if you were running a racing club, what would you do differently?” Where does babe even start? Firstly, babe believes that today’s consumer is far more savvy about what they want and also looking for ans