The TAB is a major entertainment business with more than 180,000 TAB account customers and a retail network with 640 outlets. Betting is offered on a wide range of racing and sport events from New Zealand and around the world.

The challenge – to increase customer engagement with racing and to deliver growth in racing play days, turnover and profit.

To do this they created a digital racing game called The TAB Apprentice, which follows the career of an apprentice jockey who starts out in the provincial racing circuit and makes it all the way to the Melbourne Cup.

Entrants complete a race in their jockey career each day that they place a racing bet through their TAB account.

The gameplay experience included watching an actual race (using Trackside footage). If the horse they were riding was the winner of the race, they won a $5 prize.

Entrants collected a trophy for each group of 4 races that they completed, along with an entry into the Grand Prize Draw.

The TAB Apprentice was hugely successful at engaging TAB customers and encouraging them to bet more often on racing.

The TAB Apprentice created a 31% uplift in racing play days over the control group, generating an additional 30,771 racing play days throughout the month!

The TAB Apprentice broke TAB records for email engagement with average unique open rates of 55.91% and average unique click through rates of 47.24%.

Finally, the TAB Apprentice returned a staggering ROI of 609%, making the budget go much further and deliver far better results than if they had simply run free bet offers.