A recent iGB article revealed that a UK parliament report was advising the gambling sector to take a stricter approach to ‘gambling sponsorships and influencer marketing to better protect young and vulnerable people from gambling advertising’.
The report comes from an All-Party Parliamentary Group, or APPG – and when one of those is making a report, you know you’re in big trouble, because that means it’s something big and bad enough for politicians across parties to actually agree on something.
We all know that this doesn’t happen often. For gambling to be this common enemy, however, is really not unusual. But what makes this one worse is that the co-chair of the Gambling Reform APPG is none other than Iain Duncan Smith, one of the UK’s most loathed politicians.
Even a cursory Google search of the man (Iain Duncan Smith’s twattiest moments yielded nothing, but Iain Duncan Smith worst moments brought gold) reveals stories from the present day going back years, people declaring him a ‘cowardly and cruel ideologue’, ‘arrogant, smug’ and ‘the worst human’. His welfare cuts left a legacy that won’t be forgotten anytime soon in the British Isles, that’s for sure. But this column isn’t WhatAboutery. Let’s get back to the problem here.
As is often the case, the problem with this APPG is limited knowledge of what they’re actually doing. It’s fundamentally a group of politicians with very little knowledge of working-class people, and I would suggest very limited knowledge of gambling. The APPG comprises 28 members of parliament, including two knights, two lords, and a baroness.
What’s in the APPG report?
The iGB story explained that the report suggested a blanket ban on advertising before 9pm; and an end to sports sponsorship, with exemptions for horse and greyhound racing; restrictions on content marketing and influencer promotions; a ban on ads embedded in children’s games; and that’s just a selection.
I’ve pulled those points out because they’re worth addressing, so let’s look at them one by one. A blanket ban on advertising before 9pm? Not the end of the world by any means, though 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’s perfect… I’m kidding. But seriously, a 9pm watershed would not be the end of the world.
An end to sports sponsorship, with exemptions for horse and greyhound racing… You’re joking, right? This is the same kind of idiocy that suggests the lottery isn’t gambling. If it’s 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’s ok for them? I daresay there might also be a ban on croquet sponsorship snuck in there at some point too.
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’s grown at an insane rate. Regulation needs to be encouraged to catch up. This one is basic common sense, and it needs sorting now.
Same for the ban on ads embedded in children’s games, this is just basic moral sense. And we have that, don’t we? I wrote a while back about a promotion for a Goonies slot – now, it’s arguable that it’s aimed at adults, and ones of a certain age. But you can’t escape that the original movie was intended to appeal to kids, and using the artwork from that might conceivably still appeal to children… Evergreen licences need to be considered within this.
Blanket ban on gambling advertising?
But a ban on advertising? That wouldn’t work. In fact, I would suggest it’s 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.
Bear with me here. I’m thinking back to Franco’s 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.
After Franco’s death, Spain joined the EU and the tax had to be binned – and do you know what happened? Spain became a huge growth market for whisky. But that’s not the point I want to make. It’s 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’s all-but-ban had made the drink sexy.
Normalising gambling
I’m all for protecting the vulnerable, but normalisation is exactly what’s 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 – and combined that should basically bring us to safety for all players.
Gambling is largely normalised in the UK – we have had high street bookies forever. Nobody cares, generally, and thanks to fixed odds betting terminals being rightly largely neutered, they’re not the public health risk they previously were. But this is more about online betting, both casino and bookmaker.
But here’s the real point I want to make. It’s 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 £1 billion and £1.5 billion – and that’s just the regulated market. You can likely add close to another billion there.
That’s 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’t. Apart from the change in methodology in 2023, the figure remains pretty much static.
How effective is gambling advertising?
Different conclusions could be drawn from this. You might suggest that gambling advertising is not very effective, if we can’t 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.
The quantity of advertising is often cited as a key issue by critics, and it’s really hard to disagree. For example, University of Bristol research 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’s an absolutely insane number of messages of various kinds, including pitch side hoardings and shirt sponsors. It’s simply saturation, and that rarely goes anywhere good.
I 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.
It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality. The next half-decent gambling ad will probably do really well, but it’s 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.
So maybe… just maybe, our dull advertising in its massive numbers will actually drive disordered gambling prevalence down in the long run. Everybody wins!
Original article: https://igamingbusiness.com/marketing-affiliates/appg-wrong-about-gambling-advertising-ban-uk/
