Finland Gambling Bosses Fear Advertising Backlash

Finland should brace itself for a advertising-driven political backlash in the months after the market opens in 2027, leading Nordic CEOs have warned.

Finland is set to end its gambling monopoly and open the market to licensed companies at the start of 2027, with operators then free to legally advertise in the country for the first time.

“On January 1, 2027, [operators] will push the button on the biggest marketing campaign Finland has ever seen, and in April of the same year there are elections,” said Christer Fahlstedt, CEO of Paf.

Finnish elections are scheduled for April 18, 2027. 

“I bet in the final debate [of that election] this industry will have very few friends left,” said Fahlstedt, speaking at the Finnish iGaming Event in Helsinki last week.

Paf is an operator based on the Swedish-speaking Finnish island of Åland, which has been allowed to coexist with Veikkaus in what is otherwise a monopoly market.

Executives are already concerned that operators will be forced into a mass media advertising race by restrictions currently baked into the proposed legislation. 

The most recent draft of the new gambling law outlaws ads on social media and includes a prohibition on “third party marketing” that effectively bans affiliates.

Officials have only a few weeks to make amendments to the draft before an expected submission to the EU in late October.

But even if concerns around advertising are addressed, Fahlstedt warned that there was very little that the industry or officials could do to prevent a marketing explosion, as operators desperately compete for market share in early 2027.

He predicted that gambling ads would particularly dominate around sporting events, noting that this is exactly the kind of marketing blitz that has proved unpopular elsewhere.

“No country in Europe has accepted this and I don't think the Finns are going to accept it either,” he said.

Fahlstedt said that the industry should look to the Netherlands as an example of what is likely to happen to Finland.

What began as a liberal marketing landscape when the Dutch market re-regulated in 2021 has morphed into a complete ban on untargeted advertising, effectively outlawing all TV and radio ads. 

The political response to gambling has become so dire in the Netherlands that some politicians now openly demand that the government completely uproot the open licensing model.

“I think that’s a massive problem from the industry. If we can remove TV advertising during the period when politicians and decision-makers are watching we’ll be in a much better position,” said Fahlstedt, half jokingly.

“If we piss off the decision-makers we have no friends.”

Veikkaus CEO Oli Sarekoski, speaking on the same panel, agreed that his company and others would be forced to spend big on marketing in the early months of the market.

“When one is investing €1m, the others are also investing. The media will be happy, but it’s not lasting very long. So it’s a party that will finish one day, maybe after the elections,” he said.

Fahlstedt also took the opportunity to lay into the Swedish Gambling Authority, which he characterised as “unacceptably bad”, and predicted that the new Finnish regulator set to be established before 2026 would be better.

“I’m not so worried about the Finns. The Finnish authorities, I think they work better than Swedish authorities. I would be surprised if we have the same screw up we see in Sweden,” he said.

Both CEOs, along with fellow panellist Fredrik Wastenson from Swedish state-owned Svenska Spel, agreed that the incoming Finnish regulator needed to do more to tackle the black market than the current Swedish regime.

Asked directly if Svenska Spel would be applying for a licence in Finland, Wastenson said the operator currently had no plans to extend beyond Sweden.

Beyond future political woes, Fahlstedt also predicted that Finland, and Europe as a whole, would move towards mandated sharing of customer data between gambling companies.

He cited the UK, where a trial of a so-called “single customer view” project called GamProtect is currently underway. The UK regulator has warned it could soon become mandatory to take part if more operators do not sign up to take part.

“We will come to a centralised system. That’s happening in all developed regulations. We’ve got to understand that’s where we’re gonna end up,” said Fahlstedt