How do you make horse racing feel culturally relevant to an audience the mainstream campaign was never built for? You don't adapt. You start over.
Ontario Racing needed to grow its audience beyond mainstream markets. The task: make horse racing a genuine entertainment consideration for Chinese-Canadian audiences — both Mainland and Hong Kong — who had no existing relationship with the sport.
The mainstream agency came in with a simple ask: adapt their script. Swap the language, add Chinese faces, done. They'd spent serious money shooting horses and sets — and here was a small multicultural shop that had been doing their adapts, suddenly suggesting their work wasn't right for this audience.
It wasn't a comfortable conversation. The existing campaign was built around habits that simply weren't this audience's. Cinemas and casual restaurants aren't where Chinese-Canadians spend their Sunday. Dim sum tables, karaoke bars, golf courses — those aren't exotic alternatives. Those are just their life.
We didn't adapt their script. We wrote our own. The client understood why. The audience responded like they were being spoken to for the first time.
A near-original TVC — the first of its kind for the agency. OOH placements at high-footfall Chinese community locations. A three-page print innovation that placed the reader between two halves of a horse race before offering a choice: read the same news, or experience something different.
Radio in Mandarin and Cantonese — two dialects, two cultural registers, both built natively.
An integrated campaign developed natively for the audience — not adapted from mainstream. Award-winning work that exceeded every metric set.
