The BackPage Weekly | Sports Betting Activations, Players and their “Strong Appeal”
Written by Ollie Raggett & Chris Paget
Sports betting sponsorship has become a central component of the modern sports landscape, no more so than in football. Whether it be watching in stadia, on screen or simply purchasing merchandise, the average sports consumer (of any age) will inevitably have some level of exposure to a sports betting company. Take the Premier League, which this season has eight out of twenty teams having gambling company sponsors on their front-of-shirt. The situation is even more acute down the pyramid where no less than 2/3rds of Championship clubs have betting sponsorships on their kits.
While we still await the publication of the Government White Paper, which will publish the findings of its review of gambling legislation, there remains credible intel that PL clubs may look to agree a voluntary front-of-shirt ban for sports-betting companies. While this would mark a significant step change, it would seem unlikely that clubs would completely turn their backs on revenue from sports betting companies. It is well reported that outside of the top 6 clubs, sports-betting companies provide significantly greater revenues on a like-for-like sponsorship asset than non-betting companies. As such, clubs and betting companies alike will probably look at more innovative ways of activating any relationship and players are a likely central component of such plans. However, as we highlight below, this approach may be very difficult to reconcile with the new tighter regulations.
With the above context in mind, and the increasingly loud calls for tighter regulation of the betting industry, the ASA responded with new rules in October 2022 aiming to protect young and vulnerable people from gambling advertising-related harm. Given the potential for players to be even more central in club’s sports-betting activations (across all player-owned and third-party-owned media), we felt this edition of the BackPage Weekly was a good opportunity to highlight some of the key take-aways from the new ASA guidance which should be considered when launching content campaigns in the sports-betting space:
🥇 Particular Appeal vs Strong Appeal
From October 2022, the new ASA rules introduced a ‘strong’ appeal test - prohibiting content (including imagery, themes, and characters) that has a significant level of appeal to under-18s. This appeal is regardless of how, or on what media, it is viewed. The ‘strong appeal’ test replaces the previous restrictions on creative content which required that ads must not be of ‘particular appeal’ to under-18s.
Notably, the higher threshold identifies types of content that would be high risk as that which has:
Accordingly, the impact of this higher threshold test is felt particularly within mainstream sports.
🥈 Higher the ‘profile’ the higher the risk
Applying the new ‘strong appeal’ test, a recent ruling by the ASA found that a sports-betting advert featuring Philippe Coutinho, Jesse Lingard and Kalidou Koulibaly was in breach of the ASA rules. The ruling noted the popularity of high-profile PL footballers as appealing to a broad demographic - especially among supporters of the clubs the footballers played for. The ASA highlighted that football was an activity in which a very significant proportion of under-18s participated directly on a frequent basis and had a general interest in through following professional teams and players across a variety of media.
As such, a promotion featuring current, elite level footballers would likely ‘strongly’ appeal to those under the age of 18 and breach the ASA rules. Interestingly, a similar case involving a promotion featuring (ex-footballers) Peter Crouch and Micah Richards was not found to be of strong appeal to under-18s.
The ASA ruled that following assessment of Crouch and Richards’ media profiles their audience was predominately adult oriented and so would not fall within the scope of the “strong appeal” to children. These rulings have served as a useful distinction to demonstrate that elite level talent/athletes (particularly those of significant public-interest) featuring in sports-betting content is more likely than not to trigger a breach of ASA rules.
🥉 Age verification and social media advertising
A recent ruling by the ASA found that a tweet by Ladbrokes featuring PL footballers was in breach of rules and thus had ‘strong’ appeal to under 18s despite (i) the tweet being boosted to only reach users who were aged 25 years or over; (ii) data showing that from a total of 50,666 impressions of the tweet, 0% of their targeted audience was under 20 years old; and (iii) the fact that Ladbrokes’ twitter feed and tweets could not be accessed by users who are not verified as being over 18 by the platform. In making the ruling, the ASA confirmed that self-verification on social media is not a sufficient control or accurate enough mechanism to exclude under 18s. It would seem, therefore, that notwithstanding what would appear reasonable and proportionate protectionary measures by the bookmaker, it was the use of the PL footballers in the campaign (and their strong appeal to U18s) that was the material element that caused the breach of the regulations. This further highlights how challenging it will be going forwards to use players within such content/campaigns.
Final remarks
It seems of little doubt that sports-betting regulations will continue to tighten, and it will be interesting to see how this will impact the commercial decisions of both teams, betting companies and players/their agents alike. With greater scrutiny by both the ASA, wider government and any new Independent Football Regulator, the marketing, advertising and content creation for sports-betting faces a significant challenge to continue to engage consumers while operating within this new framework of checks and balances. Whether this tightening of the regulations has an impact of club revenues, only time will tell, but whatever the outcome the use of sports people to activate betting sponsorships will continue to pose challenges and regulatory risks.