The UK Gambling Commission have been pushing big changes over the past few years to better serve the players on the growing number of services, many of these changes have been aimed at making games safer, making games less accessible for those signed up to services like Gamstop and Gamcare, or even making adjustments to games to make them more in favour of the players with more transparency and fewer features that make losing track of play a common thing too. The most recent change to hit the UK market has been aimed at advertising.
Some of these changes have been a long time coming, the UKGC has aimed to remove celebrities and influencers from different advertising platforms for quite some time and the changes that are to be put in place by October 1st of this year – the new rules stipulate that figures including sports stars will no longer be allowed to appear in television adverts that represent online gambling or online betting and this also looks to extend to different platforms including social media, radio, and other forms of advertising too. The UKGC had also stated have also stated that operators who don’t stick to these restrictions as outlined could face penalties for not staying onboard with the adjustments.
A growing question is whether or not other markets will look to follow the same change too – the US market has been going through major change with adjustments to legislation that now sees 32 of the US based states allowing some form of online sports betting with the potential for online casinos to also emerge too but without the same restrictions to advertising which brings a large market potential for audiences to be exposed to advertising platforms, but things are a little different in the US as states individually can make decisions around these rights which could have some explore advertising options more than others.
Other countries such as Italy already have some restrictions, however these are more focussed around which kinds of services can be advertised rather than how they’re advertised and may be a direction that some other markets also look to follow by keeping only casinos operated within the country to be advertised.
There’s still likely plenty of change coming to many different markets on the horizon as online gambling grows and thrives, with billions of active gamers the potential market is already likely much bigger than some forecasts anticipated and with the changing demographics being aimed at these new gambling markets too, advertising ability will be a core part of these business strategies.