The iGB story<\/a> explained that the report suggested a blanket ban on advertising before 9pm; an end to sports sponsorship, with exemptions for horse and greyhound racing; restrictions on content marketing and influencer promotions; and a ban on ads embedded in children\u2019s games. And that\u2019s just a selection.<\/p>\nI\u2019ve pulled those points out because they\u2019re worth addressing, so let\u2019s look at them one by one. A blanket ban on advertising before 9pm? Not the end of the world by any means, although of course I have absolutely no idea how this would work online. But for broadcast media, why on earth not? Of course, the World Cup is in the Americas this year, so that\u2019s perfect\u2026 I\u2019m kidding. But seriously, a 9pm watershed would not be the end of the world.<\/p>\n
An end to sports sponsorship, with exemptions for horse and greyhound racing\u2026 you\u2019re joking, right? This is the same kind of idiocy that suggests the lottery isn\u2019t gambling. If it\u2019s a sport, and it attracts sponsorship, surely the rules need to be the same? Or is it that many upper-class people enjoy these particular sports, and so it\u2019s ok for them? I daresay there might also be a ban on croquet sponsorship snuck in there at some point too.<\/p>\n
The influencer promotions and content marketing is a great example of the difficulties regulators have in keeping pace with progress. I mean, even five years ago there was barely any gambling influencer traffic anywhere. Now that\u2019s grown at an insane rate. Regulation needs to be encouraged to catch up. This one is basic common sense and it needs sorting now.<\/p>\n
Same for the ban on ads embedded in children\u2019s games, this is just basic moral sense. And we have that, don\u2019t we? I wrote a while back about a promotion for a Goonies slot \u2013 now, it\u2019s arguable that it\u2019s aimed at adults, and ones of a certain age. But you can\u2019t escape that the original movie was intended to appeal to kids, and using the artwork from that might conceivably still appeal to children\u2026 Evergreen licences need to be considered within this.<\/p>\n
Blanket ban on gambling advertising?<\/p>\n
But a ban on advertising? That wouldn\u2019t work. In fact, I would suggest it\u2019s a really, really bad idea. We have seen all kinds of punitive measures on gambling in various countries, and mapped the exodus to offshore operators, but bans bring a different kind of risk with a side effect that nobody in government would want. They might make gambling sexy.<\/p>\n
Bear with me here. I\u2019m thinking back to Franco\u2019s reign in Spain, during which he slapped an incredibly high tax on Scotch whisky imports. This led to the drink becoming the the darling of the famous and wealthy, and seen as aspirational by working class Spaniards.<\/p>\n
After Franco\u2019s death, Spain joined the EU and the tax had to be binned \u2013 and do you know what happened? Spain became a huge growth market for whisky. But that\u2019s not the point I want to make. It\u2019s that whisky became hugely popular among the young, with a much larger proportion of 18-30-year-old drinkers than any other country. Because Franco\u2019s all-but-ban had made the drink sexy.<\/p>\n
Normalising gambling<\/p>\n
I\u2019m all for protecting the vulnerable, but normalisation is exactly what\u2019s needed. Gambling needs to seem mundane to under-age people; if you force it underground in any way, you genuinely run the risk of sexing it right up. You need transparency, appropriate regulation and normalisation \u2013 and combined that should basically bring us to safety for all players.<\/p>\n
Gambling is largely normalised in the UK \u2013 we have had high street bookies forever. Nobody cares, generally, and thanks to fixed-odds betting terminals being rightly largely neutered, they\u2019re not the public health risk they previously were. But this is more about online betting, both casino and bookmaker.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the real point I want to make. It\u2019s estimated that around 2010, gambling advertising spend in the UK was at a quarter of a billion pounds. Not a small amount, but not huge. In 2025, that spend was estimated to be between \u00a31 billion and \u00a31.5 billion \u2013 and that\u2019s just the regulated market. You can likely add close to another billion there.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a big, big jump. Now check the problem gambling prevalence figures for the same period. Does the rise in disordered gambling match the advertising spend growth? No, it doesn\u2019t. Apart from the change in methodology in 2023, the figure remains pretty much static.<\/p>\n
How effective is gambling advertising?<\/p>\n
Different conclusions could be drawn from this. You might suggest that gambling advertising is not very effective, if we can\u2019t even get people that either are addicted, or could become addicted, to play more with our advertising. I certainly think we can conclude that the advertising is not nearly as potent as we are being led to believe.<\/p>\n
The quantity of advertising is often cited as a key issue by critics, and it\u2019s really hard to disagree. For example, University of Bristol research<\/a> from October 2025 found that gambling marketing messages during Premier League broadcasts had tripled from 10,999 to 27,440 between 2023 and 2025. That\u2019s an absolutely insane number of messages of various kinds, including pitch-side hoardings and shirt sponsors. It\u2019s simply saturation and that rarely goes anywhere good.<\/p>\nI think as an industry we should agree with some of the APPG findings, but not for the same reasons. Because of the blanket nature of most advertising, the bulk of it is just really, really boring.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the quantity, it\u2019s the quality. The next half-decent gambling ad will probably do really well, but it\u2019s only because the rest are so bad. But because every gambling company is advertising, every gambling company has to advertise and we end up in a vicious cycle where gambling ads are simply mass, and mass without creativity is dull, lifeless, pointless. Not to mention really bad at what it sets out to do, which is win over potential customers.<\/p>\n
So maybe\u2026 just maybe, our dull advertising in its massive numbers will actually drive disordered gambling prevalence down in the long run. Everybody wins!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The APPG for Gambling Reform has urged the government to crack down on gambling advertising in the UK,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[245935,49,48,84,245936,393,394],"class_list":["post-666821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-appg-gambling-reform","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-jon-bruford","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}