Lotteries look to entice youth
Only 19 per cent of Millennials buy tickets
Dearie me.
Youth aren’t buying lottery tickets the way they once did.
According to Andrea Marantz, who speaks for the Western Canada Lottery Corporation, between 70 and 80 per cent of adult Canadians buy lottery tickets, at least occasionally.
But those between 18 and 34 — the socalled Millennial Generation — just aren’t playing. Only 19 per cent buy tickets, even occasionally.
In Ontario only 13 per cent of lottery-ticket buyers are under 35. The mean age for regular weekly purchasers of lottery tickets in Ontario is 52.
The upshot? Big national lottery products like Lotto 6/49 and Lotto Max are experiencing historic levels of decline for the youngadult demographic.
“The novelty is gone,” says Garry Smith, a research co-ordinator with the Alberta Gambling Research Institute. “Lotteries are the most benign form of gambling, and the least exciting. There’s not much of a thrill involved.”
Gambling, he says, can be a coping strategy for people unhappy with their lives. Young people, Smith suggests, may simply have found more exciting or rewarding distractions.
“How can you make a ticket appealing for an 18 year old but not a 17.5 year old?”
JEFFREY DEREVENSKY
Now, you might find it refreshing that skeptical, numerate young Canadians are refusing to throw away their money on the false promise of lottery tickets. You might rejoice that savvy young people are declining to be gullible lambs, fleeced by their own governments.
Not everyone wou ld agree.
The Interprovincial Lottery Corporation, which represents all provincial and territorial lottery agencies, has just issued a request for proposals for a consultant who can analyze “the motivations and barriers to play for 18-34-year-old lottery players” and generate ideas for “a new, national lottery game that will be attractive to the 18-34-year-old player base.”
Marantz says they want to attract a generation raised on video games and social media, a generation more inclined to spend its petty cash on double lattes than lottery tickets.
“We want to see if a different kind of prize or a different kind of game might appeal to this particular age group.”
Now, any business that sells a product wants to protect its market share. And all kinds of businesses, from clothing stores to newspapers, are struggling to find ways to attract Millennial shoppers. But lottery tickets aren’t like other consumer products. They are purposefully designed by the state to rip people off, all the better to enrich the state itself. They are a toxic entertainment. They sell false hope and hollow dreams. They distract and dissuade people from taking actions and making choices that could actually improve their lives.
Despite the wording of the RFP, Marantz says the project will focus on buyers 25 and up. And, she says, as of April 1, Alberta will be cracking down on lottery ticket vendors, requiring them to request ID from anyone who looks under 25.
Still, the idea that Crown agencies should be actively looking for ways to exploit young adults fresh out of high school seems more than a little distasteful. And if you create and market a project for young adults, you surely run the risk of making it rather too appealing for younger teens.
“How can you make a ticket appealing for an 18 year old but not a 17.5 year old?” asks Jeffrey Derevensky, of the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High Risk Behaviours at McGill University. “Why doesn’t the interprovincial committee throw money at educating youth about the potential risk signs associated with problem gambling?”
But we know why. The people really addicted to gaming are politicians. In Alberta, the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission is expecting to collect $1.5 billion in gaming revenues in this coming budget year. It’s forecasting $345 million in net revenues before operating expenses from ticket lottery sales alone.
But that pales beside the $1.4 billion it expects to net from electronic gaming: slots, VLTs, and e-Bingo.
Some of that $1.5 billion will go to support things like the performing arts and amateur sports. But in Alberta, much of it goes straight into general revenues, to pay for everything from highway maintenance to school buses.
Hook gamblers with cool games and tricks when they’re young and they may well keep on lining provincial coffers. But at what social cost?
As a culture, we’ve made smoking uncool. We’ve made impaired driving uncool. One day, will lotteries be so unhip they’ll simply fade away, forcing our governments to find more socially constructive tax policies to pay for basic services?
One can hope. But I, for one, wouldn’t bet on it.