Could horse racing be looking down a yellow brick road?
It was probably the adman in me bingeing on watching reruns of the brilliant television series “Mad Men” about the early years of Madison Avenue while popping antibiotics to rid myself of a crippling shock to the system. Not recommended.
I was also watching the popular J-Mac aka James McDonald rule Flemington racecourse with another outstanding display of Group 1 race riding and winning. The meeting was also promoting what some online racing radio stations in Australia called the “Macca”McSmart Meal.
MacMania was heaving throughout the Flemington racecourse with streaming services, television, restaurants and everywhere else that follows horse racing seeing J-Mac ride four winners with the last three of them being for just McDesserts.
With his likeable personality and being a family man is everything the McDonald’s brand looks for in who and what they might wish to get behind.
Of course, whether he would want to us up to him, but there’s so much he can do to help promote horse racing to a more mainstream audience and perhaps even have other brands see their involvement in what can become a far more commercial product than it is today.
How exactly McDonald’s works as a sponsor for, one guesses, the Melbourne Spring Carnival, is something that I have no idea about, but it’s certainly food for thought regarding McDonald’s being a global sponsorship partner of horse racing.
Having been part of the team to launch the Golden Arches in Hong Kong and continue as the client’s ad agency DDB’s regional creative director for two decades, McDonald’s was a fantastic school for marketing and attracting some of the best advertising people from around the world.
Hell, I even graduated from McDonald’s University in Chicago with a degree in French Fries. Working alongside me was a cute young thing from Hong Kong with a name I will always remember: Milky Wei.
Corny stuff? Not all all. Smart- extremely smart marketers and communicators, and with much of this success or McSuccesses built around the corporate ethos of QSC and V- Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value.
In Hong Kong, it was this and the always inquisitive and playful mind of Daniel Ng, below, a great friend, sadly no longer with us, and also the visionary Chairman of McDonald’s for Hong Kong and Asia.
A former NASA chemical engineer, Daniel believed in McDonald’s being a success despite the Whopper of a flop in Hong Kong of Burger King and advised by research groups that Chinese only ate rice. They were so wrong.
McDonald’s in Hong Kong quickly became the most successful McDonald’s franchise per capita in the world.
After having created the Happy Wednesday brand, which immediately attracted thousands of more international younger people, it was about throwing the net out and see who else was out there and happy to come in as partners.
Together with entrepreneur Manu Lee and his Burger Joys brand, created for a limited time only was the Zac Attack Burger.
More- much more - was to follow, but then there came the Covid variant, lockdowns, racing inside bubbles, the usual internal HKJC staff foxtrots and many years of a city in fear and paranoia and walking on eggshells. The exodus of the core Happy Wednesday regulars during the protests in the city didn’t help.
Even if there’s still not much happening on a regular level between Racing Victoria and McDonald’s, there’s so much that CAN be done to broaden the appeal of the main event with some thought and imagination- like reintroducing everything from music to themed racing days and nights just to remind us that we’re coming up to 2027 and the world has changed forever.
Perhaps even work at giving less creepiness to racing’s usual talking and laughing heads and make everything else lying there more relevant and interactive and which can continue after the racing and punting is over?
Horse racing needs to think beyond the Ka Ying and Yang and ka-Ching Field Of Dreams and wontons and drowning in a tsunami of brown suited plushies.
Marketing is all about the BUSINESS of creating the new with what’s already been introduced that hopefully has legs.
Revolution and evolution are how any business stops becoming a plodding one trick plushie and evolves into new and exciting business streams.
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