Cheltenham Festival campaign 2023

When the most famous meeting of the racing calendar comes around race fans do not want to miss a single minute.

Racing TV is the only channel to deliver all of Cheltenham. With every single race live, on air for 8 hours a day and with analysis from the best presenters and pundits, it really is the complete experience. Nothing is missing.

We wanted to show Racing TV has all of Cheltenham covered, in a premium way and with a light tone, avoiding the sometimes ‘stuffy’ perception of the racing industry.

The concept set up Cheltenham as a number of component pieces and we brought this to life as a jigsaw. Visually we wanted to show that every piece was included with Racing TV - nothing at all was missing. To bring to life the emotion of the event we knocked some of the jigsaw pieces out of position - suggesting the full-on, engrossing nature of the action was running through the creative and causing this effect to happen.

The campaign used 2 key messages.

”Complete your Cheltenham” was used to launch, suggesting you might not have everything in place. Then as the Festival got closer we moved to a more direct message for the subscription proposition - “Watch every piece of Cheltenham”.

We also ran a half price offer inviting prospects to watch every piece of Cheltenham for half price.

New subscribers were up a massive 48% year on year with paid media delivering a CPA which was £33.92 less than the previous year and had almost double the number of conversions.

From the Free month trial we had 1,860 take ups - a 54% increase on the previous year and 56% were converted into paying subscribers.

One other result of note was the direct mail. In previous years the approach has been a printed and personalised A4 offer letter folded in a DL outer. This year, an obvious opportunity was to mail prospects an actual Racing TV jigsaw. The performance justified any commercial scepticism and delivered an 8% increase in response versus the norm. This more than compensated the additional production cost and helped showcase that creativity can increase effectiveness and opens the door for the years to come.

Not bad for a content subscription brand post pandemic!

Take a look at our other acquisition campaigns for Racing TV