OCEANPORT &mdash Monmouth Park’s opening day of its thoroughbred horse racing season is Saturday.
But, if you need reminders about the big event, plenty of them are being sent out via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In an effort to expand customer base, Monmouth Park will travel the superinformation highway this year, said Robert J. Kulina, the track’s general manager and vice president. Kulina, 59, notes some incongruity with the initiative, admitting that the track’s “marketing people laugh at me because I can barely turn on my computer,” he said. “This is the way everything is going with the technology,” Kulina said. “It wasn’t too long ago where you first began noticing people texting as they were walking around the track, and here’s where we are now. Horse racing missed out a generation ago on the TV sports boom and we can’t afford to miss out on the Web and electronic technology boom.” Monmouth Park’s meet runs from Saturday through Sept. 27, with racing on weekends only until June, when the regular five-day weekly schedule gets under way. Post time each day is 12:50 p.m. Officials said “fan only” information and promotions will be available through Facebook. Videos have been posted to YouTube, including a segment featuring track announcer Larry Collmus. “Monmouth Park in particular has been at the forefront of leading this new way to reach customers,” said Keith Chamblin, senior vice president of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association. “They and other tracks have been trying to promote the sport in ways I don’t think we could have imagined a few years ago.”
Chamblin said racing’s customers mostly are “older and skew male. As the circle from the core demographic moves out, it moves toward the younger and more casual customers and begans to skew more female.”