High-stakes research into online gambling / Protecting Children from Gambling Harms

Research by Professor Agnes Nairn and Dr Raffaello Rossi

The number of UK children experiencing gambling related harm has quadrupled to more than 50,000 in just four years. Existing advertising regulations ruled that gambling ads “must not be of particular appeal to children”, but no one had investigated what actually “appeals” to them, or how ads were used on social media platforms.

Research by Professor Agnes Nairn and Dr Raffaello Rossi investigated the effects of social media gambling ads on children and young people.

Their first project focused on gambling ads on Twitter. Using big data analytics of over 880,000 UK ads, along with data of 1,000,000 users, they found:

• 41,000 UK children followed gambling accounts
• two-thirds of engagements with ads were made by under 24-year-olds
• 71% of gambling ads failed to fully comply with regulations set by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

A further concern was that only 7.3% of posts from betting-related accounts were found to contain any warning about age restrictions and responsible gambling. For esports accounts, this number fell to just 0.1%, displaying the very worst in advertising practices.

The second study found that gambling advertising on Twitter was significantly more appealing to children and young people than to adults. Esports ads and ads using content marketing were found to be especially appealing, triggering happiness, excitement and delight in under 25-year-olds.

The research contains several recommendations, including making existing age verification tools available to advertisers, integrating explicit age restrictions in advertising, banning esports gambling advertising and regulating gambling content marketing.

Beyond receiving substantial media coverage, the researchers gave evidence to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), the National Digital Ethics Expert Group by the Scottish Government, and the House of Lords’ Peers for Gambling Reform. 

The research led to three direct changes in current advertising regulations:  First, a public consultation into regulations to protect children from harm via gambling ads was announced by the ASA in response to the research findings. The consultation led to updated and clearer regulations to improve the protection of children. 

Second, an advice notice clarifying the regulations for esports betting advertising was published by the advertising regulators. 

Third, the regulators changed the rule that advertising should not be “of particular appeal” to children (ie more appealing to children then adults) to “of strong appeal”.

Finally, the ASA has addressed a loophole raised by Nairn and Rossi; namely, that content marketing was not in their remit.  As a result of the research, the ASA announced that all content marketing, not only for gambling but for all products and services, would fall under their regulatory purview. Beyond this, the collaboration with Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust helped develop their educational programme, which reaches 500,000 children each year.