Tight odds
Betting firms face being tackled over surge in sport advertising
APremier League footballer who has been banned from the game for 13 months for breaching betting regulations may seem an unlikely champion of the UK’S anti-gambling lobby, but Joey Barton has never been one to follow the straightforward path.
Earlier this year, Barton was suspended from football after he admitted placing more than 1,200 bets over a 10-year period. At least five of the bets were made on matches in which he was playing.
In a lengthy statement, Barton said the sport’s governing bodies “need to accept there is a huge clash between their rules and the culture that surrounds the modern game, where anyone who watches football on TV or in the stadia is bombarded by marketing, advertising and sponsorship by betting companies”.
Despite the circumstances, Barton’s message struck a chord and his words were welcomed by campaigners including Gambleaware, the charity tasked with minimising gamblingrelated harm in the UK.
Then, in June, the Football Association suddenly called an end to its £4m-a-year deal with bookmaker Ladbrokes, saying it could not justify having a gambling partner. That decision, combined with Barton’s attack on football’s cosy relationship with the gambling industry, added momentum to a movement that has been gathering pace.
Two broadsheet national newspapers last week ran front-page stories on the dangers of gambling. On Monday it was reported that children were being exposed to a record number of gambling adverts, and on Friday the Gambling Commission said that more than 2 million people in the UK were either problem gamblers or at risk of addiction.
In short, a storm is gathering. “We would be mad not to take notice of that growing background noise of concern,” says Clive Hawkswood, the chief executive of the Remote Gambling Association, the trade association for the online betting industry.
The sheer volume of gambling adverts around live sport has been a particular source of frustration for campaigners. According to research from Nielsen, the industry has spent a total of £1.4bn on advertising since 2012. Of that, £430m has been spent on sports gambling advertising, almost doubling from £64m in 2012 to £127m in 2016.
The Government’s long-awaited review of fixed-odds betting terminals, which has been delayed until later this year, has garnered plenty of attention amid claims that bookmakers are making it too easy for problem gamblers to lose thousands of pounds in a short of space of time.
What has been less prominent in coverage of the imminent review has been the fact that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is also examining gambling advertising regulations.
“There will inevitably be something in there about advertising,” says Hawkswood. At present, advertising companies cannot advertise on TV before the 9pm watershed except, crucially, during live sport. Similar regulations were also in place in Australia, but earlier this year prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the government would ban advertising during live sport before the watershed.
Such a move remains unlikely in the UK, not least because of a mounting suspicion that the watershed has become increasingly redundant in the modern, digital world. Yet live sport’s appeal to the advertisers remains strong.
“Because of the nature of television advertising and because [live sport] is the thing people are turning on to watch, it is going to be attractive and exactly the sort of place we want to advertise,” says Hawkswood, who makes the case that gambling companies are putting money back into sport through their spending on advertising.
“So there are commercial reasons for doing this,” he says. “But we are very mindful of the concerns that are being expressed. I expect some additional measures will be introduced.”
The most likely of those measures will be an increase in responsible gambling messaging around adverts.
Gambleaware, which has made its own adverts to highlight the risks of addiction, is hopeful of securing more regular slots for them to be aired, with an example being a potential agreement that one Gambleaware advert is broadcast for every 20 betting adverts.
It is not just television, of course. Social media is an increasingly important battleground, particularly over concerns that young people are being peppered with offers and adverts.
And there is also sponsorship: nine Premier League clubs count gambling companies as their primary shirt sponsors. The biggest of these include Betway’s £10m sponsorship of West Ham, Sportpesa’s £9.6m deal with Everton and Manbetx’s £6.5m deal
with Crystal Palace. There are similarities with the relationship the tobacco industry enjoyed with Formula One in the late 1990s, when tobacco brands were plastered across the sport until firms were banned from sponsoring sporting events in 2005.
“I think the bubble will burst,” says independent sponsorship consultant Nigel Currie. “At the moment, the gambling industry seems to be getting away with anything. In terms of their advertising and their sponsorship, there don’t seem to be any restrictions at all.
“It’s bonkers. If you look at live sport now on television, there is not an ad break that does not have at least one gambling advertiser.
“It is almost a stampede. For broadcasters like Sky and BT it’s fantastic, and for a lot of football clubs. When they run out of ideas trying to find a sponsor, they just phone up a gambling company and they do it.
“Certain products become a problem. Tobacco was obviously the first and I can see other products like fast food and fizzy drinks having similar issues in time to come. But the next cab off the rank is definitely gambling in terms of having restrictions placed on it. It has probably slipped under the radar for too long.”
What, then, would be the impact of stricter regulations? Hawkswood says it is the smaller gambling companies that would be hit disproportionately hard by a tightening of the rules, rather than the likes of Bet365 or William Hill.
“The large companies already have big customer bases,” he says.
“And a lot of this advertising is fighting for existing customers, bearing in mind that the average online gambler has around five accounts.
“Brand loyalty is not great: customers shop around for best value, and why wouldn’t they?”
The giants of the gambling industry already have access to enormous customer and marketing bases. “They are already so established and there are so many other ways to communicate with existing customers,” Hawkswood says.
“But if you are a smaller company trying to get into the market, and trying to grow your footprint, that is really hard if you can’t market fully.”
Some campaigners, of course, will never be happy without an outright ban on gambling advertising. Others simply want to make clearer the dangers of gambling.
Quite how much change there will be rests in the hands of policymakers, but with momentum building, it seems to be a case of when, not if, that change will be introduced.
‘The industry seems to get away with anything – there don’t seem to be any advertising restrictions’