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UK campaigners for gambling advertising restrictions are pressing a slogan for their wishes: gambling should be “permitted but not promoted”.
Academics, campaigners and what some call experts by experience called for the new Labour government to impose a ban or severe restrictions on gambling advertising.
They sharply criticised the previous government's April 2023 gambling white paper, which, instead of recommending a ban, called for extending voluntary codes, citing a “lack of conclusive evidence on the relationship between advertising and harm”.
The “easiest and most cost-efficient” way to minimise gambling harm would be to ban gambling advertising, but short of that the government should prohibit bonuses and incentives, affiliate marketing and use of customer data in marketing, said Clare Wyllie, research director for Tackling Gambling Stigma.
House of Lords member Don Foster called for consideration of a ban on direct gambling marketing, inducements and sponsorships on “precautionary principles”.
They spoke on Tuesday (September 10) at the Gambling Advertising Reform Summit in Westminster, the traditional seat of the British government, in a conference sponsored by Peers for Gambling Reform, in what one member called the House of Lords’ biggest lobbying group.
Earlier this month, a group of members of parliament filed a motion urging the government to urgently act on white paper recommendations, including imposing a gambling levy, further affordability checks and advertising limits.
Today, industry lobbyists the Betting and Gaming Council hold a conference on GamProtect, an industry project to try to keep players safe by sharing information in a way supported by the Gambling Commission, the Information Commissioner's Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.
Some gambling reform panellists found the industry’s reliance on content marketing to be especially problematic.
Content marketing is the placement of material on social media not explicitly promoting a product but meant to stimulate interest in that product.
In sports betting, that typically means Twitter/X jokes about football that do not mention gambling.
Raffaello Rossi of the University of Bristol said the university’s study with Ipsos MORI found that such ads were four times more appealing to children than adults, and children had a “very poor” ability to recognise the marketing as advertising.
“The self-regulation of marketing by the gambling industry is completely failing,” he said.
Gambling Commission policy director Ian Angus said a ban or serious restrictions are a matter for the government and parliament to decide, with the regulator’s role mostly limited to enforcing how free bets and bonuses are offered, and trying to keep out advertising from illegal operators.
Licensees are wholly responsible for the actions of third parties, including affiliates, and a crackdown following advertorial abuse a few years ago means significant breaches of rules by affiliates are today hard to find, he said.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) does not regulate sponsorship, but it believes that a 2022 tightening of rules has been effective in keeping marketing away from underage youths, said ASA chief executive Guy Parker.
He said he thought “causal evidence” of a link between gambling advertising and harm would be no easier to find than that of a link between ads for fatty and salty foods and harm, because there are “too many confounding factors”.
At best, he said, you might find a “modest impact”.
Still, “there is work going on, and we are trying to make sure advertising-related harm is minimised”, Parker said.
Will Prochaska, director of the Campaign to End Gambling Advertising, said he thought to use an alleged lack of causal evidence to avoid banning gambling advertising was a “political decision”.
But he said, “I would welcome steps toward” what would eventually become a complete ban.
