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The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has rebuked Entain’s Ladbrokes brand for including four top men’s tennis players in promoted tweets, as they were ruled as likely to appeal to under-18s.
The ASA dismissed Ladbrokes’ response, which said that the vast majority of the followers the players had on social media were over the age of 18 and that their commercial sponsorships were with adult-oriented brands such as Peugeot, Hublot and ANZ Banking.
The upheld complaint further defines what sort of links between gambling marketing and promotion of sports figures are acceptable in the UK.
In July, two of Ladbrokes’ promoted posts on Twitter featuring Premier League football managers were ruled to be improperly appealing to minors.
But in June, a bet365 Tweet involving middleweight boxer Chris Eubank Jr was considered permissible, in part because the sport of boxing was considered as not appealing to children.
In February, the ASA ruled that a Paddy Power ad featuring retired footballer Peter Crouch did not have strong appeal to under-18s, mostly because he is retired.
In the case announced today (August 9), the authority said it considered that the athletes — Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Nick Kyrgios — were tennis players “at the highest level and who had a significant national profile”, which meant they would be considered “high risk” under the ASA’s guidelines for protecting under-18s from viewing advertising for gambling or lottery.
The promotions would have been acceptable had they appeared in media in which under-18s are strictly excluded, the ASA wrote.
Twitter, now called X, has self-verification for age, according to the ASA’s documents.
