The Brief

The Melbourne Cup is more than just a horserace, it’s the race that stops a nation, the one day of the year that all Australians gamble, but with a field of 24 thoroughbreds it’s also the hardest horserace to pick. So our strategy was to help punters choose a horse and bet online by showing them which horse would win the race. To do this we turned to the social experiments from the 1920’s observing the wisdom of crowds and used Twitter as our crowd to predict the winner, which became the Melbourne Twitter Cup.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

We needed to encourage more people to place their Melbourne Cup bet online and projected a 5% increase in online bets as a response rate. We knew people were already turning to their own networks and social channels to get tips and Twitter was also abuzz with Cup predictions. So we built The TAB Twitter Cup, a real time Twitter data aggregator that visualised tweets as a virtual horse race. Our site ranked tweets to either move individual horses along the racetrack or pull them back into the pack. Punters could see live odds, bet and share across social media.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Amazingly eight days out from the race, the wisdom of the Twitter crowd predicted the actual Melbourne Cup winning horse Fiorente with a clear margin. This social experiment reached 1.7 million Australians and allowed the TAB to organically trend on Twitter during the hype and speculation before the race. Our brand was discussed more across the Melbourne Cup than all of our competitors put together and created an 18% uplift in online betting with the TAB compared to the same period last year. TAB owned the excitement of Australia’s greatest race, reaffirming its status as Australia’s leading betting company.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

While the whole nation was trying to pick the winner, we used social listening and ranked Tweets on individual horses, trainers and jockeys to help inform the bets of irregular punters. No one had ever seen a virtual horserace driven by Twitter before. The TAB Melbourne Twitter Cup wasn’t just entertaining; it was also a genuinely useful tool for TAB’s audience as each horse offered the opportunity to bet with live odds and current commentary. Suddenly the wisdom of the crowd on Twitter was alive and racing for all to see and TAB owned the excitement of Australia’s greatest race.