Harness: Capturing a younger audience

My name is Ray Cotolo. It's a name I understand snips mixed reactions, ranging from "Oh, him!" to "Oh... him..." and even the occasional "Who?" I understand all of these, and even have similar reactions when I hear my name. I imagine, too, that this column was given to me potentially with some hesitation by my new editor, but I honestly would not want it any other way.

For context, I carved into the racing scene firstly as a journalist and soon after as a commentator turned wise guy with my show North American Harness Update (NAHU), which has now been spun into the handicapping tip site nahupicks.com. I've called races, I've written on races, I've bet on races, and unfortunately, have lost bets on races. For everyone already familiar with me, I appreciate your long-lasting support or apologize for infesting your brain. I want to make sure I cover all camps here.

I'm sitting here writing this while experiencing the 23rd year of my so-called life. Harness racing has encapsulated around 13 of those years, of course alongside many other hobbies and interests. But racing has always been a sport I feel uniquely engaged in and attracted to more than any other. However, this doesn't mean that it's my end-all-be-all. Sure, racing is always there for me and I am always ready to look at a race, but by now I hope you -- the lovely reader at home -- have picked up on the fact that I am by no means the poster example of a young person on this planet.

We've heard, or at least I have, the same cry of "needing young people in the game" ad nauseam to the point that I felt motion sick even thinking about tackling this topic. And in coming up in the sport as a young person, I heard a nauseating amount of praise for "how great it is to see a young kid in the game" and so on. I don't mean this as an area of disrespect either -- it more so says how well I take compliments. But I feel racing really needs to understand young people, especially if this cry will continue to ring in the years to come.

Already in my time growing into the sport, the paradigm of culture feels to have shifted into a whole other millennium within the short span of 10 years. Of course, back in the olden days of 50 years ago, racing stood as a fixture of nightlife, with competition including the colored television, drive-in movies and whatever other activities were imaginable, all while gambling on the 1970s dollar provided strong returns even just for $100. But now, more than ever, racing has lost ground in the attention economy, and a $100 return barely ekes the cost-of-life budget for most in 2022. I can, at little to no cost: play video games, stream movies, hang out with friends in absolutely any medium, and do all of this with little to no thought with just a click of a few buttons. This change in socioeconomic landscape, along with the myriad avenues for entertainment, have strained racing as an experience and choice on the town for many young people.

For one, people my age do not necessarily have money to throw around. And if they do, they put it towards other avenues including paying rent, feeding themselves and buying bitcoin. God, so many of them put their money into cryptocurrencies -- and some even into stocks and options. A boom of investing occurred in the pandemic among young people as content was made and communities began to form around the idea of treating Wall Street like a casino. With people showing how they became overnight millionaires because they took out $20,000 in margin on Tesla calls, droves of young people began putting their money into the colorful world of speculative investing, all because they were exposed to it.

On top of this, when I'm on YouTube scouring for a piece of entertainment to quell the deafening silence surrounding me, I swear that about nine out of 10 ads I get are from sportsbooks. They have been militant in trying to get young people into the sports betting game, and I genuinely can't see why ADWs don't want to have that same kind or even just a skosh of that fervor. Sure, you don't have to convince someone they know how to bet a basketball game, but racing platforms -- be that racetracks or wagering middlemen -- should make efforts to promote themselves beyond the insular adverts from NBC Sports' coverage of the Breeders' Cup.

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New customers should always be the goal, and I can tell you a great deal of potential young customers exist on platforms reachable through Google's AdSense, especially given the growing volume of horse racing content on YouTube and even beyond that with the growing communities of gamblers that post their tickets and their scores on Twitter. Even this kind of grassroots community building can be a great gateway into the sport for those not exposed.

At the risk of further spinning into realms that might warrant their own columns or instead a manifesto, let me just flat-line spitball a few measures that we as an industry can take to draw more eyes from young people. Ironic to say at this point, but these will be somewhat disjointed and all over the place:

Expand your advertising

A social media presence is good and vital for drawing engagement, but promo tweets or posts can go a long way. I've gotten promo posts ranging from random people tweeting their headshots for acting work to one where a dude was just lip syncing the scene from The Simpsons where Homer is tucked into bed like a warm cinnamon bun. The reach these promos can have is insane. But most importantly, you cannot hammer in advertising enough that the races have FREE ADMISSION! A race card can provide hours of entertainment, meanwhile I have to pay $12.50 to go see Licorice Pizza, which I hear is okay. In this case, the age-old adage of tell 'em it's free is still true. They'll figure out how to bet if they want to.

Expanded ADW advertising

For young people, having access to the races through something as mobile as a cell phone can keep them engaged. I know there's complications in terms of ADW rake vs. racetrack income and such, but flat and simple the convenience these services provide can bring more young people into the game, especially since often racetracks are located in more remote regions, and who knows how much it would cost to Uber there or if there's any sort of public transit to and from the track. ADWs can provide the vehicle to create the interest, and usually the pieces fall into place from there.

ADWs promoting customers

We've already seen a growing camaraderie among horseplayers on Twitter, so why don't these betting services want to promote when one of their players hits something big AND did it on their platform? This goes back to the exposure point -- if you show that someone can hit a ticket for like $5,000 on your platform, that gets the mind rolling. "Can I do that?" "How did they do that?" I'm reminded recently of how the Paulick Report covered that one bettor that took down the Rainbow Six at Gulfstream for over $1 million before a mandatory payout -- news like that spreads and feeds the horseplayer dream. Sure, we should bet responsibly, but I feel I'd be hard-pressed to find someone who bets horses as a hobby doesn't have any lingering dream of "that big score." It's an incredible selling point that also transcends generations.

Racetracks work with communities to draw people

Meadowlands does a great job with this, for example, with there being a bus route through NJ Transit to connect The Meadowlands to Manhattan and other areas of North Jersey. Woodbine is even working on making its racetrack a hub for Toronto's GO Train system, which will make getting to the track easier and accessible for everyone. And the best part is that something like this, while cost effective for the younger crowd, also is a great way to get people of any age to the track in general. Public transit, if possible, is good and should be something to lobby.

It may have been a winding road just to get to this point of exposure, but that's the world as it is today. We are -- especially the younger generation -- inundated with so much media, information and stimulus that sticking to a particular point without digressing into a rabbit hole of academic terminology and technologies you've never heard of is basically impossible. And that's the main takeaway I want the sport to have -- understand that there is so much happening in the world even beyond the bloated entertainment economy. When we understand that, then the course we plot for the sport going forward can only be clearer and more fruitful for the generations to come.