If you ever watch sporting events from the 80s, you see Marlboro advertisements everywhere. Cigarette companies advertised in every single sport all the time in a gigantic marketing blitz - I think in the future we will see gambling ads now in the same way.
Marlboro continued to advertize in F1 even after a ban on tobacco advertizing, with that subliminal barcode logo. Which makes me think that we might see similar circumvention attempts should gambling advertizing be banned.
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For a while PMI wasn't even mentioned until you dug a few pages in. And then, still only ever "PMI" until a few layers further. Some countries like France were aware enough to ban the advertising for races hosted within their jurisdiction.
To this day I don't believe we banned and mauled tobacco industry unanimously. Looking back from 1930s up to 2000s their ads were EVERYWHERE. Outdoors, events, magazines, sports, all genres of movies and TV series. It was a monstrous lobby.
I recall a game theory argument that the tobacco advertising ban was overall a boon for tobacco companies, since most of the effect of advertising was poaching other brands' customers rather than getting non-smokers to pick up the habit.
A ban on gambling ads might ironically similarly be in the interests of gambling companies.
no need to wait for the future. If you watch the news of the local variety at least in my area, most of the advertisements are for betting. Same with sports.
The future they mention is when you look at the old footage and get the same feeling you get when watching old videos of people annoyed that they won't be allowed to drive drunk or have to wear seatbelts, and think "how could they ever think that was normal?"
At the moment, those gambling ads are pervasive and, sadly, "normal".
I've occasionally been in a pub when there's been sky sports showing a football match
Now, remember to watch sky sports you have to pay something like £50 a month.
They then saturate half the program with adverts of people gambling.
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, gambling was something James Bond did at Monte-Carlo with a vodka martini, or something my grandad did with the horses in a seedy shop next to the chippie. The only thing about gambling most people saw was some "pools" thing that was mentioned after the football results.
Now people spend £600 a year to be bombarded by messages telling them it's normal to get your phone out and put £10 on who will score the next goal when watching a football game. Maybe it is normal now, but it didn't used to be 20 years ago.
I had a mild giggle to myself when I read the playstore app rules after they updated something unrelated and sent an email out.
Ireland and the UK have an exception to the rule banning gambling apps, and their in-app payments. So you could gamble with money from your phone bill/prepay credit. I'd be interested to learn the history of that.
They sponsor team strips, and then those players get done for dodgy gambling deals, but don’t mention the advertising… it’s almost like there’s some disconnect…
They did this in Sweden. I think that people was not even worried about gambling addiction, but just totally tired of the non-stop amount of loud flashy ads. Gambling ads usually are quite aggressive and TV, websites, bus stops, everywhere there were gambling ads.
It worked. Nowadays it is not easy to see this kind of ads anymore.
Gambling ads usually are quite aggressive and TV, websites, bus stops, everywhere there were gambling ads.
As are ads for just about everything.
It isn't just the products they push. The ads themselves are toxic and are pervasively blighting our lives (and probably shortening our physical lifespans as well).
Seriously these should all be drastically curbed all across the public (physical) sphere, as has already happened in some places (e.g. São Paulo).
Some day, very far from now, when humanity finally realizes this -- we'll look at the saturation of advertisements in the 19th-21st centuries like we do on the haze of rampant air polution, pervasively contaminated water, horse manure (and dead horses clogging the streets) of bygone eras, today.
I would support this. Just the other day I was having a conversation with my partner about how, recently, gambling advertising has really exploded all over Chicago, and it really is quite obnoxious.
I doubt a ban would happen, though. The worst offender for eyesore gambling advertisements is the state-run lottery.
I think the political challenge there is that the ban on TV ads for alcohol (and tobacco, for that matter) was largely fueled by public concerns about children consuming these products, and I don't think there's the same level of worry about kids gambling. In the US these days there seems to be more public fear that kids might somehow be harmed for life if they read And Tango Makes Three even once.
More people need to see interviews such as those in the
People Make Games video "How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos" - skip to 15mins for them.
For people not in the UK, gambling adverts during live sporting events are absolutely insane. If you're not on the BBC[1] you're literally getting at least 2 or 3 gambling adverts every ad break if you're watching any sort of sport, and all the billboards, players shirts etc feature gambling companies. I'm actually in broadly favour of allowing a well-regulated gambling industry as it's a pastime that a lot of people enjoy and I think the government should mostly let people get on with things but the situation at present is completely crazy. For people who have a gambling addiction and want to quit it must be pretty much impossible to watch any sport.
[1] The BBC is publicly funded via a license fee that is compulsory if you have a television so it has no adverts
This is basically the same situation in the US as well. It’s kinda sad that the sports industry across the board are all beholden to these companies now. Makes you really think about any close calls by the officials/referees. A LOT of money involved now, and it appears to be on a very sharp upward trajectory. Legalizing sports betting is one thing, but constantly throwing it in everyone’s faces is a whole different situation.
The gambling ad style that bothers me the most is, e.g., YouTube channels doing paid advertising within a video. It's typically in the tone of, "Join me and my subscribers who are winning $X on Sports Betting Dot Com!"
I know the average person might not be so stupid to think they will automatically win when engaging in gambling, but the ads feel inherently dishonest and scummy nonetheless.
I don’t watch sports these days so I wouldn’t notice, but I’m surprised gambling is now advertised in the states. It wasn’t like that in the 80s and 90s.
> The BBC is publicly funded via a license fee that is compulsory if you have a television so it has no adverts
Childsplay! In Germany you have to pay the equivalent fees regardless of whether you have any way to even access it, or want to, or care. It's okay, it's "only" like 18€ per month (!!!).
Not quite true. It has adverts on the Friday Night spot, and probably on Breakfast TV, and the One Show (evening talk show) -- they're just posed as "we chat to $actor who has a movie out now", or "$author has a book or now, here they are to talk to us". But they do disallow small businesses, and they only advertise their own media offerings (and no, they're not just 'trails' as they sometimes don't even tell you when it's on).
Maybe it's better overall, to I only see it a couple of times a year and it seems to adopt all the worst traits of commercial TV; even if there adverts are less intrusive.
>>The BBC is publicly funded via a license fee that is compulsory if you have a television
No, it's only compulsory if you watch live TV broadcasts as they would be shown on TV. If you only watch Netflix and other streaming services(other than BBC iPlayer), or only use your TV for a games console/blu ray player then you explicitly don't need a TV licence. It takes 30 seconds to confirm you don't need the licence online and then you're exempt. I've not paid it for over 10 years at this point as we never watch actual TV in this house.
Sports fans. But yeah, all BBC online TV content also needs a license (it didn't in the early days of iPlayer); and recently they added a delay to podcasts (which you can't buy separately) if you're not a license holder.
This is the answer. Don't criminalize vice, that just leads to systems of oppression. Instead, do not allow anyone to advertise vice or anything that is harmful to society.
Its working well for banning tobacco ads. Just have to ban ads for gambling, alcohol, cars, etc.
No, I’m not and I really don’t understand how you’d come to that conclusion. I really want to know why you’d lump in car ads along with ads for alcohol and cigarettes.
I already gave one possible answer, which is also my opinion.
It's easy enough to imagine someone else might go further with the reasoning about safety, pollution etc and decide all cars should be banned, rather than a subset.
Not totally on topic, but another form of 'advertising' I would like to see banned is branding on fast food packaging.
It bothers me when I see that someone has littered their bag of McDonald's (or whatever else) and this behavior has turned into an effective form of advertising in benefit of the chain because, seeing the litter, I am reminded of the chain's existence. Wondering if other countries or even locales have done something about this as opposed to the US.
That's a naive solution. One company could simply litter the city with a competitor's bags.
This is why those "WE BUY JUNK CARS" and "WE BUY HOUSES 4 CASH" signs are not punishable based on the owner's phone number. I could just as easily put YOUR number on one of those signs.
For the record, the owner of Bet365, the UK’s largest gambling company, has earned roughly £1.5 billion in dividends since 2016 and is the UK’s largest taxpayer.
The story about how gambling adverts were originally legalised in the UK is pretty interesting.
The gambling companies threatened to take the Blair government to the European Court of Competition on the grounds that it was unfair competition for National Lottery to permitted to advertise but not them [1]. The government took the threat seriously and then openly legalised gambling adverts.
[1] (Mentioned in talk by a member of the original Budd Report team which laid the path for the 2005 Gambling Act) https://youtu.be/t_isuKNKAbs?t=926
Just ban organized gambling. It’s a scourge on British society and a tax on the poor, ruining countless lives - not just of the victims but of their families as well. If any other industry had such a trail of destruction in its wake it would have been banned long ago.
I don’t much mind if people play poker with their mates, and the lottery seems tame enough. But the betting shops have to go.
The US is so corrupt, we have state sponsored gambling: the lottery.
I remember when gambling casinos in the US was considered predatory and immoral and only a few states allowed it (Like Nevada and New Jersey), now it's opening up in many states because they want the money.
It's just another sign of the machine feeding itself at the expense of it's citizens.
Casinos also seem to be such depressing places. It was one thing when they were a novelty that you needed to go to Nevada to experience, but now Indian casinos are common in our area and they just seem so sad.
I used to go on a casino cruise routinely with my friends in college because the drinks were free, you'd just want to tip the servers. And you had to be visibly gambling, so we'd sit at nickel slots and play slowly. If you measured out how much you were spending and were diligent about it, it would still come out to less than buying liquor to drink at home.
Super depressing though. I sat down next to an old lady once and she snapped at me because the slot machine was "hers", as she planned to work three slot machines next to each other at the same time. One time, someone died of a heart attack on the ship (most of the people there were old).
The irony? It's the citizens approving these projects. It's the citizens without money to spare lining up to lose their money as a form of "entertainment".
Worse tho are tobacco products. Known carcinogen. Addictive. And...the government allows the sales to persist and then taxes it. Why do the right thing when you can rationalize it as someone else's moral failure? Think of all the things banned during Covid (i.e., a respiratory virus). Cigarettes was not one of those things.
Fidelity Investments is running what are essentially gambling ads. They show people on skateboards "trading". As with gambling, retail traders, as a group, are losers. 78% to 95% lose, depending on whose statistics you use. This is pathetic. Just buying and holding most reasonable index funds does far, far better.
For stocks, there's this thing called "production", which results in "profits". It's not zero sum, like cryptocurrencies. "Trading", though, means fees and spreads, which is how brokers make money and traders lose it.
and all tourism (with planes) ads, all cars ads, all fast-food ads, all drinks ads, all furnitures ads, all smartphones ads, all consumerism things ads. Things you really need, don't need ads
The way that gambling has become so common and open in sports these days is bizarre. It wasn't like that at all before. Fantasy leagues have always been a thing. But constant reminders about betting on every sporting event during broadcasts seems a little dystopian.
