Sport Industry Group

23 Feb 2010

Peter McNeile, director of sponsorship at Cheltenham Racecourse, talked to Sportindustry.biz about commercial revenue for the upcoming Festival.

How do you generate interest in potential sponsors for the festival?

Obviously the events themselves have wide exposure on terrestrial and digital TV, online, print - all sorts of coverage - so that creates wide exposure and opportunities for potential sponsors. Horse racing, especially big annual events such as Cheltenham provides a great platform for sponsors to invest in.

There are the sponsors who look to forage the market and those who look to coordinate certain deals and Cheltenham Festival allows them to do this.

With a racecourse this size there are always events throughout the course of the year that draw potential sponsors in because Cheltenham Racecourse is at the summit of the sport.

How has the recession affected sponsorship on horse racing this year?

There is no doubt that it has affected horse racing, especially the hospitality market which is a real precision area in people looking for business opportunities.

But now, because of the recession, people don’t feel that they can afford to entertain and others feel that they cannot be entertained.

Sponsorship, however, is robust as investors sign contracts for two or three years so you look to pull out of these tough times together. Also the money is high and they are locked in to the deal.

Cheltenham is slightly cushioned from the harsh reality because people are focused on providing the Festival with its best event yet, looking to improve on the year before.

There is a tremendous will for this event to be fantastic from the suits in the corporate boxes to the punters on the ground, everybody wants this to be a memorable event which is something that I haven’t seen replicated across the sporting board.

Have you ever considered a Title sponsorship for the festival?

No we haven’t, mainly because we didn’t get to where we are now by going down the title route. To unravel the Festival in that way would be very demanding and we don’t feel that we need to do it.

Our defensive posture means that we don’t place all our eggs in one basket, so if someone drops out we can fall back on our other sponsors.

It is much better to have twenty sponsors to make a huge song and dance about the Festival because they drive more traffic and even more sponsors to event.

There are more and more people coming to the event with more sponsors getting involved because they all want to join the party.

The way that we market the Festival means that we can do more if we drive it individually.

How many new sponsors have you managed to generate this year?

Ironically we have a huge amount of repeat business at the Festival and across all of the horse jump racing industry.

This year we have a few sponsorship additions with the opening race now being called the ‘Spinal Research Supreme Novices’ Hurdle.

The Plate race also has a new sponsor with the Byrne Group plc backing the race on Ladies Day.

Our primary interest is developing new relationships for other times of the year.

The Cheltenham Racecourse holds several events across the course of the season and there are plenty of sponsorship opportunities at these ever increasingly popular meets.

People always like to invest in Cheltenham because they can have the ownership of one of the most prestigious horse racing events in the world.

Can you ever see casual sports fan being interested in other meets rather than just the flagship races?

I think that the casual sports fan is interested in other meetings, but they may not travel to every racing event.
The reality is that we have loads of meets all over the country, every Saturday there is a great event going on which is always popular. Now, I know that those events don’t get huge, football like attendances but they draw good sized crowds. 

People are very time poor and to get them to go to more than two events a year is asking a lot as there are also demands on money, so if you look at it that way then the attendance figures are impressive.

 Unfortunately partisanship in horse racing is not the same as football but, unlike other sports it is something that you can pick up the following week having missed the weekend before.

I don’t think we will ever get to football attendance standards but  are mission is to further increase frequency in attendances.

Who do you think will win the Gold Cup this year, Kauto Star or Denman?

I don’t think it’s a two horse race, there are several other contenders so wouldn’t surprise me at all if something came out of woodwork.

Horse racing is wonderfully unpredictable, as we’ve seen recently, you make one tiny error and you get punished and unlikely winners come through.

 I don’t think either horse is unassailable but the story is a marketers dream as they look to build it up as ‘The Big Rematch’, but the reality is that anyone can win it.

What is your fondest memory of the Cheltenham Festival?

The time when Desert Orchid ran that fantastic race in the ghastly weather conditions in the 1989 Gold Cup.

The rain was hammering down and it was a real slog in mud between him and Yahoo. But Desert Orchid was an immensely charismatic horse, and he thought, ‘damn this, I’m not going to be beaten, I’m going to try even harder.’

He really was a wonderful horse and we saw him paraded here at Cheltenham a number of times.