Horse Marketing Madness
By Tina Hammond

The world of video sales has changed very little all things considering. Vimeo and TikTok continue to demolish any sense of style in video production. Continuity and flow in horse videos was always a tough one. People chopping up footage to hide the faux pas moments every horse will exhibit from time to time made for annoying review.
 
For true horse marketing madness consider making one of these short videos that tell your buyer absolutely nothing. Keen frustration with the lack of relevant information will be sure to turn them off. What are you hiding? Why can’t you make a decent video to show case your horse?

 
Well for one thing where can you upload any video of a decent length? Secondly where can you publish it that the quality settings are top notch and don’t automatically revert to automatic dumb down quality for quick downloads?
 
YouTube has to compete with the other platforms. Despite its inherent editing nonsense the idea of making a good quality production and uploading it on something other than your SMS or What’s App with all the limitations is hardly doable.
 
Texting me snippets of a horse in action doesn’t cut it. If I am going to travel a considerable distance to see the horse then I want to see something recent of it doing its thing. And doing it well. Whatever that is claimed to be.
 
There are ‘dropbox’ options for placing your well-produced video to share. But they can be expensive to run if you only use them periodically and selling horses is not your main enterprise. But these are well worth the spend if you have a performance priced equine to market.

 
The photographic AI mayhem means photos are not the ideal solution to review a horse either. What you can do to change a horse’s overall frame or elevation in a gait is a bit too complicated for most people to manage thankfully. So for now a photo is relatively O.K. but it is a static moment and not truly useful.
 
The use of a home ‘smartphone’ photo or grainy video will have to suffice for now. Not sure what is coming next. AI will take over the world we all know that and ‘fake’ everything already surrounds us. Who knows, perhaps we’ll have to go back to just talking to the owner, looking at the show card results and actually getting off our bottoms and go ride the horse. Old-fashioned methods can work well. And let’s face it, horse buying trips were always fun if pressure-filled experiences.
 
The major horse marketing madness method has to be posting the horse for sale at an online marketing site. Enjoy the results. Lots of interest from lots of people with no interest. Not real interest only. The modern-day tire-kicker has a joy ride. Try it. Use a generic email. You’ll need it.

Plus side you can spend oodles of time checking out the profile of the buyers. Learning absolutely nothing of import. So, no, not really much of a plus. There are some real buyers out there. Good luck finding them though. A bit like sending everyone VHS tapes back in the day. Unless they pay a video deposit perhaps they are not serious. No they are not.

 
Expect your carefully screened and edited video and photos to be poached too. Your horse will appear for sale elsewhere. Expect that. No way to properly protect the material. No way to properly track its use. Backgrounds can easily be edited out. Good luck with keeping your copyright intact. Impossible.
 
So how will you sell your horse? Word of mouth? Existing student roster? At a show? To a colleague? Through a network of like-minded fellow riders at a chat group?
 
Did you develop that email list you always promised yourself you’d collect. No. Shame. You could spend a few hours a week crafting a newsletter and blasting it around like a monkey. Emails likely not opened anyway. Who cares. So much in the inbox.
 
Marketing madness indeed. Finding a good horse is going to come back to what it always has been. Who you know and who you can trust. Lay some groundwork. Spend some time chatting to real horse breeders and know the players. Know the importers. Visit abroad stables and investigate the owners. Do your due diligence.
 
Stunning idea I know. Person to person interaction is back. And yes, person to person will become ever more important as AI takes hold. Ironic really.