For years, horse racing events like the Melbourne Cup, the Kentucky Derby, the Dubai World Cup, Royal Ascot or The Everest have carried the weight of tradition with elegant outfits, champagne flutes, turf-side bets. But in 2025, brands are entering a new chapter, one where technology, fashion, personalisation and storytelling meet at the track.
Trackside branding is no longer just about champagne tents or sponsor logos. It is now about sensory immersion, emotional storytelling, digital-first design that connects with audiences far beyond the racecourse.
In this article, we explore five standout brand activations that turned race day into a canvas for creativity, technology, experiential thinking. These prove that any brand can become cultural, digital, immersive brand experiences.
White Claw’s activation at the Kentucky Derby fused fashion, music and content culture into a full sensory escape. “The Shore Club” featured a 360° glam bot photobooth, a personalised koozie engraving station and a fashion-forward design language.
At the centre of the experience was a Glamdroid robotic camera rig that filmed guests in ultra smooth slow motion as they posed in front of a custom White Claw floral wall. This was no ordinary photobooth. It was a cinematic capture system, engineered for TikTok reels, designed to help racegoers show off their Derby looks with clarity and flair. Content was delivered instantly, optimised for social sharing.
Alongside it, a leather koozie engraving station added a tactile layer of interaction. Created with Louisville-based makers Clayton & Crume, the space let guests inscribe initials onto premium beverage sleeves — tying personalisation to practicality.
Guests moved fluidly between content zones and chillout lounges, each space framed by a cohesive aesthetic: clean lines, white palettes, summer-ready textures.
Why it stood out: The Glamdroid gave White Claw scalable, high quality content straight from their audience. Every share extended reach without media spend. Every clip reinforced the brand as fun, stylish, socially fluent. Rather than push product, the activation invited people to create with it, turning consumers into amplifiers, turning a single space into a network of branded moments.
At The Everest, TAB delivered an immersive brand activation that reimagined how fans connect with horse racing. Using a virtual reality sport simulation, the brand placed guests in the saddle through a full motion experience that went beyond the screen.
The setup combined a VR headset with a motion reactive platform shaped like a jockey’s saddle. As participants entered the race, they experienced the full intensity of riding like surging forward, weaving between horses, leaning into every corner. The platform responded in real time, giving physical feedback matched to visual movement. It was fast, physical, intensely real.
Why it stood out: This interactive experience shifted TAB from betting partner to sport storyteller. It created emotional engagement without needing a product pitch.The result was a high energy moment that built emotional relevance, encouraged content sharing, placed TAB at the heart of the race day experience that can build relevance, deepen connection, drive sharable contents across digital channels.
At the 151st Kentucky Derby, Japanese game developer Cygames brought unexpected energy to Churchill Downs with an interactive brand activation built around its horse-themed mobile game Umamusume Pretty Derby. Combining anime culture with live sport, the experience introduced new audiences to racing through gamified engagement and fan-first content.
The activation featured a series of interactive stations where guests could explore the game world through touchscreen kiosks, play character demos, take panoramic photos with digital avatars, unlock Derby-exclusive collectables.
Screens displayed stylised race sequences, with soundscapes synced to the game’s dramatic in-race pacing. The booth was surrounded by life size standees of the game’s main characters, all designed as stylised anthropomorphic racehorses with real time animation, gamification and visual design. It was bold, unapologetic, culturally tuned to Gen Z habits: swipe, snap, share, repeat.
Why it stood out: Rather than sponsor the day from a distance, they built relevance by remixing racing through a new lens. It drove engagement with younger audiences, extended the game’s reach beyond its typical player base and sparked shareable content from fans who may never have posted about racing before. This was cross-category experiential marketing done with clarity, style, cultural precision.
In 2025, Great British Racing launched The Going is Good, a national brand campaign aimed at reshaping how horse racing is seen, especially by younger and casual audiences. Instead of focusing on tradition or betting, the campaign placed the race day experience at the centre: the energy, the outfits, the group chats, the feeling of being there.
The campaign used a cross channel media rollout, including video on demand, podcast sponsorships, digital out of home, cinema trailers, social reels. Each touchpoint featured real voices from the crowd, not actors, unscripted reactions, laughs, awkward dances, loud cheers. Shot with handheld cameras, styled with grainy overlays, it felt more like a weekend vlog than a corporate spot.
No horse stats, no jargon. Just people having a good time, framed through a new lens that youth culture, fashion, friends, atmosphere.
Why it stood out: For Great British Racing, this campaign reframed the sport as social. It expanded the entry point, not just for punters, but for anyone looking for a fun, shared experience. With minimal spend on tech, the activation delivered maximum relevance by listening first, then building creativity around real behaviours. It became not just a message, but a mirror helping the sport reconnect with a broader, younger base.
At the Melbourne Cup Carnival, the Victorian Racing Club partnered with FutureLabs to create an activation that asked a simple question: how do you measure joy?
Our response came in the form of a large-scale interactive LED installation designed to track, visualise, express real-time emotion across the racecourse.
Throughout the day, guests were invited to submit short feedback responses about their experience via mobile prompts positioned across the grounds. The answers were processed instantly and mapped to a collective sentiment score measured across categories like energy, mood, connection. As the crowd’s emotional temperature changed, the installation responded pulsing in colour, pattern, brightness.
The structure itself stood as a central visual anchor inside Flemington. Light patterns moved with the data. Peaks during races, lifts during performances, soft waves during quiet moments. No logos. No calls to action. Just emotion, translated into light.
Why it stood out: For the Victorian Racing Club, this activation offered a new way to engage, not by adding noise, but by listening in. It gave the brand a live emotional snapshot of the day, drawn directly from its audience. For racegoers, it was subtle, intuitive, almost ambient, a space where their presence shaped the atmosphere in real time.
This year’s racing season will definitely be remembered for more than the competition. It marked a shift, a move toward brand experiences that are more immersive, more interactive, more in tune with how people want to show up.
Across every track, the most impactful activations shared something in common - they were built around the audience. Whether through virtual reality, cinematic content, personalised design or emotional data, each one offered something real, multi sensory that marks and let customer remember, talk about
This is a new way of thinking about brand experience.At FutureLabs, we help brands lead this shift by crafting activation, systems and experiences that bring people closer, connect with purpose and move with culture.
