MY principal remit as Director of Marketing and Communications within Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) is to get more people to go racing more often.

I have a fantastic team of brighter and younger people who work their magic online and offline every day while I throw questions at them such as: do we make people more interested in racing or do we make racing more interesting?

Some of what we do is national advertising, PR and events and a lot of what we do is working with the racecourses to develop campaigns to promote a specific meeting or festivals. This is the best part of the job – visiting and working with racecourse managers and committees to try to make a difference to their businesses.

I was always a sporty person and switched between rugby and athletics as the seasons demanded. I played in Lansdowne Road (school senior semi-finals – we lost); unbeaten at 100m, 200m, 400m in my small corner of the world and a good each-way bet at 800m before the Woodbines took their toll.

My father Frank and uncle Jack loved racing and regularly sardined about eight from our two families into the Anglia to take us to Fairyhouse and the Phoenix Park. Being your typical southside Dubliner, I attended Leopardstown every Christmas, boy and man, and later included Galway as an annual pilgrimage destination.

My summer job was walking Mr Treacy’s greyhounds in Dundrum (six and a half days a week, five pounds pay and all the chocolate digestives you could eat) where I developed a good eye for a dog and backed a right few winners at our local track, Harold’s Cross. Fortunately I was either too tight or too wise to get the betting bug and remain a fiver each-way man to this day.

EDUCATION

After school I studied philosophy and educational psychology in the new Mater Dei Institute, now part of DCU, lived in London for a while and did some teaching at my alma mater, De La Salle Churchtown.

The old school tie pulled me into the advertising department of Easons on Abbey Street, where I found myself copy writing radio ads for most of the leading publishers in Britain and Ireland. It wasn’t quite Mad Men but there were a few Myles na gCopaleen moments in the Oval Bar with the Indo hacks. By night I learned the theory behind the practice in the College of Commerce Rathmines, studying advertising practice and marketing.

My next job, in the early 80s, in Bord na Mona, earned me the soubriquet ‘Mr Bricketts’ (Briquettes) when I was given the Solid Fuels portfolio. Our Marino Waltz campaign with Ronnie Drew and the Dubliners earned canonical status and continued to be aired for over 30 years.

This felt like ‘senior hurlin’ so I had to come out as a full-time marketing man.

In 1989, I joined British Midlands Airways, as their marketing manager in Dublin. We were up against the might of Aer Lingus and British Airways on the Heathrow route, but inside three years we had taken a 30% share of the market, becoming the company’s most successful route launch.

My career path now pointed to a relocation to BM’s head office in East Midlands, but with a wife and young family just settled in a new home in Rathfarnham, I was not for moving.

I spotted an ad seeking a marketing manager for the Turf Club/Curragh Racecourse and my curiosity was piqued. The ad specified that I must be able to deal with the media ‘in all their guises’ and that was the clincher – the oval bar boot camp would finally start to pay for itself.

The Curragh was an under-developed brand, as famous geographically as the Cliffs of Moher, the home of the classics and unquestionably Irish racing’s HQ. Marketing is all about building brands and the Curragh had (and has) enormous potential for growth.

I believe that I was the first formal marketing appointment in Irish racing when I started in the summer of 1992, just after St Jovite’s Irish Derby, and I remained until the year 2000, Sinndar’s annus mirabilis – with the Budweiser Irish Derby Millennium Bonus thrown in for good measure.

It is very exciting to be around as the new Curragh takes shape and to throw in my 10 bob’s worth of insight to the team. I can’t wait for the opening of the new grandstand which is a real design masterpiece.

NEW HORIZONS

I went straight from the Curragh role to the new HRI when it was established, initially working in Leopardstown and later Kill, before moving to the current premises at Ballymany.

I added the HRI logo to my portfolio of design briefs, which include Go Racing in Kildare, the current Curragh logo and the Thoroughbred County – did I say that branding was important? At HRI we build and promote the brand of Irish Racing then help the different racecourses to run with it in the way that works for them.

In 2008, I became Chief Executive Officer of the Racecourses Division of HRI, a position I held for three years. The recession hit just as I arrived so austerity and redundancies became the grim agenda for a lot of that time.

The much–reduced racecourse teams at Leopardstown, Fairyhouse, Navan and Tipperary were heroic in their efforts to keep going (as were other tracks across Ireland) and, despite the odds, we secured valuable big race sponsorships as well as devising new initiatives such as the Bulmers Summer Series at Leopardstown, which is still rocking along eight years later.

Simple insight – when your traditional market shrinks find another one fast, or go out of business.

I returned fulltime to HRI in 2011, working on a strategic review to address the attendances downturn nationally and to redefine and restructure our approach to marketing.

Integrated marketing communications, with a high level of digital skills, backed up with the science of market research and database analysis proved to be the way forward. Our new suite of websites, adapted for mobile, are one recent example of this.

The pace of evolution in marketing is breath-taking in recent years, but exhilarating and rewarding when we get to grips with it. We never forget, however, that everything we do is focused on racecourse marketing support.

On that final note, the most encouraging and rewarding project in Irish racing at present is Longines Irish Champions Weekend. It shows that innovation in racing is still possible; that marketing teamwork between racecourses and HRI can create events that will last; that blue-chip international consumer brands will back Irish racing and that, with the new Curragh under development and the renewed Leopardstown also in hand, we will actually live up to that over-stretched phrase ‘world centre of excellence’.

Michael O’Rourke was in conversation with John O’Riordan