Project Beacon: Racing’s £484,000 Lighthouse Pointing at the Obvious

British racing has unveiled Project Beacon, a half-million-pound consultancy exercise from M&C Saatchi, hailed as the “most in-depth consumer research ever undertaken in our sport.” Which sounds impressive until you realise it amounts to little more than a glossy PowerPoint deck telling the industry what everyone already knew — people quite like the Grand National, worry a bit about horse welfare, and couldn’t care less about a wet Wednesday at Wolverhampton. This is an exercise in pleasing and flattering the client rather than presenting hard truths that may be difficult to swallow.

The Horserace Betting Levy Board, acting as the sport’s endlessly obliging banker, paid £484,000 for this. Not on prize money. Not on improving toilets at racecourses. Not on fixing the £7 pint problem. Just another consultancy exercise, complete with mood boards, fancy typologies, and, no doubt, a title slide featuring a silhouetted horse galloping nobly toward a metaphor.

The “Great Discovery”: People Aren’t Against Racing

Beacon’s headline revelation is that 25 million adults across Britain and Ireland are “addressable.” In consultancy-speak, that means they don’t hate the sport enough to sign an online petition against it. Of those, 16.9 million are either “casual” or “potential” fans — the kind of people who’ll put a tenner on the National once a year, or might half-watch the Derby if they stumble across it on ITV between trips to the fridge.

This, apparently, required months of surveys, stakeholder interviews, and countless bar charts in teal and grey. For nearly half a million pounds, the industry has been told something that could have been scribbled on the back of a betting slip: “Some people quite like it, others don’t care, and a few think it’s cruel.”

Punters Sorted Like Hogwarts Houses

Of course, no consultancy report is complete without a taxonomy. Beacon dutifully produced eight audience “typologies,” designed to impress executives with colourful diagrams and names that sound suspiciously like rejected Netflix dramas. There are the Open-Minded Rookies, the Social Stakers, the Event Lifers, plus the Serious Betters and Racing Experts — in other words, exactly the people racing already knew existed but are now grouped into obscure typologies.

They give the illusion of insight — a neat, symmetrical pie chart that reassures everyone in the room that progress is being made. But in practice, it’s just a glossy way of saying “some people watch a bit, others don’t.” It’s consultancy smoke dressed up as segmentation.

Barriers We Already Knew

The survey also “uncovered” the big obstacles to growth: worries about horse welfare, lack of emotional connection, the dominance of other sports, and the reality that people only care about the big days like Cheltenham and Aintree.

Groundbreaking stuff. And no doubt presented in the kind of traffic-light dashboards consultants adore, with red boxes for “welfare concerns” and amber boxes for “no emotional connection.” For the cost of this revelation, you could have asked a cabbie, a postman, and a bloke in Ladbrokes, and had enough left over for a round of Guinness.

The Six “Fixes”

Beacon prescribes six “areas of focus”: improve the raceday experience, make ownership more accessible, tackle welfare concerns, demystify the sport, create a season narrative, and build emotional connections.

All worthy, all sensible — but none of it touches the real problem. Because here’s the awkward truth: you cannot engage people in a product without thinking seriously about the product itself. You don’t win over new fans by throwing slogans at them like confetti. You win them over by making the sport something worth watching, worth attending, worth paying for.

Until the fixture list is slimmed down, until prize money stops being an insult, until the race-day experience feels less like a minor league football ground with a drinks licence, all the TikTok hashtags and snappy campaigns in the world will achieve nothing. Marketing snake oil cannot disguise a creaking structure. A catchy slogan won’t convince a young punter to care about a Class 6 handicap in front of empty stands.

Reheating Old News

One of the most telling parts of Beacon is the section congratulating racing on things it already does. The “Going is Good” campaign? Wonderful. The HorsePWR hashtag? Vital. Promoting jockeys as personalities? Exactly right. Simplifying racecards? Inspired.

It’s reheated leftovers, sprinkled with consultancy parsley. The same ideas everyone’s heard before, only now presented in Helvetica with some “next steps” arrows to make it feel dynamic.

The Elephant in the Parade Ring

What Beacon avoids is the only question that matters: what about the actual product? Racing doesn’t fail because the marketing isn’t jazzy enough. It fails because it’s structurally bloated, incoherent, and increasingly irrelevant to ordinary punters.

Until the product is made leaner, richer, and more coherent — until going racing feels like a proper day out and not a wallet-draining endurance test — no number of glossy PowerPoint decks will save it.

The Final Furlong

So what has Project Beacon really achieved? Hundreds of slides, smart diagrams, and a comforting illusion of progress. A new lexicon of “open-minded rookies” and “social stakers.” A delivery office to keep the meetings going and the invoices flowing.

But half a million pounds later, the sport is no closer to facing its real problems. Racing’s challenge isn’t to “connect emotionally” with the public. It’s to stop flogging a product that doesn’t fit modern fans. Beacon has simply put a coat of paint on the cracks and called it strategy.

And so, British racing staggers on — half convinced by its own slogans, half dazzled by PowerPoint gloss, but still blind to the truth: you can’t market your way out of a structural mess. You can only fix the product, or watch the grandstand slowly empty.