Background
The complexity and availability of gambling continues to grow on an international scale [
1,
2]. In recent years, there has also been a corresponding increase in the prevalence, diversity and intensity of gambling advertising [
3,
4]. This expansion is facilitated by significant industry expenditure; especially within jurisdictions that have previously liberalised gambling such as the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. Estimates indicate that Australian gambling industry spending on marketing and promotion has increased by 33% per year since 2011 to $273 million in 2018 [
5]. UK industry spending grew over 17% per year from 2014 to 2018, reaching an estimated total of £1.5 billion [
6]. This advertising expenditure represents 10.34% of the £14.5 billion gross yield of the UK gambling industry in 2018 [
7]. Such funding has led to the development of sophisticated advertising campaigns that are disseminated across traditional media such as television [
8] and via sports sponsorship [
4]. In addition, these campaigns have resourcefully adapted to the digital sphere via online and social media marketing [
9,
10]. This shift towards the online environment has granted gambling operators uninterrupted advertising space; especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, attempts to curtail TV gambling advertising (as seen within the UK) during periods of lockdown may have little effect on reducing overall exposure amongst young or vulnerable audiences [
11].
Emerging literature has highlighted gambling as a compounding issue of public health [
12,
13]. The harmful effects of gambling and associated advertising have been suggested to extend beyond populations of disordered gamblers and are apparent across the entire harm-spectrum; including children and young people [
3,
14,
15]. Comparable to previously conducted reviews of alcohol and tobacco [
16,
17], two recently published systematic reviews [
18,
19] and one narrative review [
20] have indicated that gambling advertising is facilitative of induced gambling intentions or cravings, increased participation and riskier (more impulsive) betting. However, these reviews also identify many of the methodological gaps within the existing gambling advertising research. Within the literature there is an emphasis placed upon the self-reported effects of gambling advertising exposure, especially amongst disordered gamblers. An empirical concentration upon disordered gamblers may pathologize the issue of gambling-harm induced by advertising. This may draw attention away from advertising-induced harm experienced by low-moderate risk gamblers [
18]. Furthermore, the self-reported effects of gambling advertising are often hindered by recall and self-report bias. This may be due (in-part) to the Third Person Effect [
21,
22] in which individuals are more likely to perceive the impacts of marketing amongst others rather than themselves. In contrast, there is a paucity of research that focuses upon the specific characteristics and mechanisms that underpin emergent gambling advertisements.
There is a growing academic consensus that gambling advertising may incorporate content that is deemed misleading, utilises demographic targeting and uses embedded promotion [
22‐
24]. However, to date, no review has aimed to provide a taxonomy of gambling advertising characteristics. As observed in the movement towards increased control of tobacco advertising [
25‐
27], studies that aim to investigate the specific marketing methods utilised by the industry offer an insightful contribution in the shift towards regulatory reform and industry marketing that is more ethical and transparent. Therefore, the current review of gambling advertising characteristics seeks to complement the existing reviews of advertising effect as well as the future literature. This contribution is also warranted in order to appropriately inform the decisions of policymakers and researchers regarding effective harm-reduction strategies.
Due to the fluctuating methods of gambling advertising that largely remain free from effective regulation [
28], this review aimed to examine the empirical evidence concerning the nature and characteristics of emerging (2015–2020) gambling advertisements. Specifically, this review aimed to investigate:
-
The content and narratives incorporated within gambling advertising.
-
The methods of gambling advertising delivery and placement.
-
The mechanics and structural features of gambling advertising e.g. design, usability and complexity.
Discussion
This rapid review aimed to contribute to the international literature by improving understanding of emergent gambling advertising content, delivery methods and structural features. The evidence suggests that overall, gambling advertising has increased in both complexity and interactivity. In relation to content, previous reviews have highlighted advertising that positively frames or glamorises gambling in a broad sense [
57,
58]. However, the current review suggests that this positively framed content has evolved and diversified beyond general glamorisation. This development is especially prominent within male-orientated sports betting advertisements that align gambling with emotionally charged situations, team loyalty and peer bonding [
40,
42]. The evidence suggests there may also be an additional form of positive framing within this content that represents themes of increased control whilst underrepresenting themes of risk via a dual persuasive strategy [
44]. Positively framed advertising content may also be orientated towards young adults [
36], parents [
35] and women [
39]; although further research is warranted with regards to these groups.
The pattern of results also points towards the depiction and promotion of complex, in-play and exotic bets compared to simple bets within the content of UK football betting advertisements. There may be an economic underpinning to this marketing technique as complex bets are subject to longer odds, equating to potentially higher profit margins for the gambling industry [
49]. In addition, such bets may facilitate the emergent transformation of sports betting into an accelerated, continuous and more impulse-driven form of gambling [
49,
59]. The current review also suggests that the dissemination of incentivising gambling content such as inducements and offers continue to remain prominent methods of encouraging potential customer engagement. These incentives now take many forms [
51], are increasingly complicated, and are pervasively advertised [
44,
52]. Contrastingly, much less provision is given to content that contains RG or harm-reductive messaging within gambling advertisements. The included studies indicated that such content is inconsistent, characterised by low visibility and sometimes completely absent [
46,
54]. In their current form, such messages have been highlighted for their likely inadequacy in reducing gambling-related harm. For example, a recent eye-tracking study of bettors and non-bettors demonstrated that very few visual fixations are placed on these messages in comparison to other wagering information displayed within sports betting advertisements [
60]. Moreover, when specific RG messages are in fact actively perceived by bettors, the messages may fail in terms of their supposed purpose. An example of such message includes the popular UK RG slogan ‘when the fun stops, stop!”. This specific message was identified in approximately two-fifths of the advertising sample utilised by Critchlow et al. [
54]. A recent study of 3000 gamblers, indicated that this particular message either showed no beneficial effect of curtailing gambling behaviour or produced a backfire effect that influenced increased betting participation [
61].
Within UK sports in particular, the placement and delivery of gambling advertising has intensified over the previous 15 years. Sports betting promotions now extend beyond conventional methods of commercial break advertising and into the area of play [
56]. Consequently, shirt sponsorship [
56], verbal references made by commentators and embedded (ring/pitch side) advertisements [
55] are now saturated with gambling-related stimuli. This is likely due to the unique and liberal nature of the 2005 UK Gambling Act. Although this legislation is set for review [
62], it is unlikely that gambling-related sponsorship will be completely prohibited within UK sports. However, there is a political and academic consensus that the UK should follow nations like Spain in which gambling sponsorship within football has been prohibited by law [
63]. Future research should seek to investigate the emergent placement of gambling advertising within sports across jurisdictions other than the UK that are set to liberalise sports betting such as North America. In the context of the UK, further research is warranted to investigate the online areas into which gambling advertising may be diverted in response to increasingly restrictive and more effective legislation [
55,
64]. This transition has already commenced to a certain extent, as evidenced by the increasing presence of gambling advertising across social media platforms [
46,
52]. The regulation of advertising across social media is likely to prove difficult given the direct and indirect promotion of gambling within these online spaces. For example, the findings of the current review indicate an emerging trend in which operators utilise seemingly innocuous content to build brand awareness [
46] and finance affiliate promotion to implicitly market gambling online [
45]. The promotional intent of these methods is not often made explicit. Furthermore, affiliate marketing has been recently questioned in terms of its transparency, sincerity and true benefit to consumers [
10]. Due to this increased use of third-parties, affiliate marketing may also operate as a buffer that shifts or obscures the social responsibility of the gambling industry [
45].
From a structural perspective, conventional means of disseminating gambling advertising such as television, radio and billboards have necessarily adopted a linear approach in which advertising is a one-way process of stimuli exposure with minimal user-interaction. By comparison, the recent evidence indicates that emergent gambling advertisements have begun to utilise digitally interactive features that provide the opportunity for a more collaborative interchange between the operator and the public [
34,
45,
53]. Therefore, the current review recommends the empirical study of the mechanisms and impacts associated with these emergent structural features as a future research priority. This includes promotional URL links sent directly to bettors, gambling-related ‘polls’ posted by operator social media accounts and gambling-related hashtags utilised by consumers.
In relation to the completeness and applicability of these findings, it appears the available evidence is sufficient but not comprehensive in addressing the present research aims. As seen within the sphere of tobacco and alcohol marketing, internal information concerning gambling industry marketing is not made readily available to the public and is therefore difficult to obtain [
65‐
67]. There is also a corresponding paucity of qualitative interview studies that explore marketing techniques involving gambling industry employees [
47]. This lack of internal information results in empirical studies primarily taking an interpretative approach with researchers investigating the nature of gambling advertising via content or sentiment analysis. Although these forms of analysis are legitimate methods of elucidating subjective themes and messages within media content, appropriate measures must be taken to ensure trustworthiness [
68]. However, amongst such studies in the current review (
n = 20), only 11 reported the use of numerous coders. Such methodological limitations reduce the reliability of the associated studies and impede the quality of the research area.
The included studies typically included large samples of televised gambling adverts that were representative of those aired to the public. Although the content of televised adverts may be targeted, they are not disseminated based on the personalised data of the audience, thus individuals who watch the same television broadcast will be presented with the same advertisement. In contrast, representative online advertisements may be more challenging to obtain and investigate due to the industry trend of moving away from the use of online blanket marketing and towards the utilisation of individually targeted advertisements that utilise the digitised personal data of the user [
47]. Theoretically, individuals could visit the same web page but be presented with different gambling advertisements. Furthermore, although mentioned anecdotally throughout the associated literature, there is a noticeable lack of research that investigates unsolicited pop-up advertising disseminated online and within mobile apps. These advertisements may be difficult to empirically study due (in-part) to their unpredictable and context-specific nature. This review therefore proposes investigation into online gambling advertisements that use personalised data as an additional future research priority in congruence with this popular marketing strategy.
It also appears the gambling advertising sphere may evolve at a speed that the academic literature struggles to keep pace with. The current review indicates that the literature base surrounding the nature and characteristics of gambling advertising has slowly expanded between 2015 and 2020 but remains underdeveloped in terms of scope and methodological diversity. In contrast, much more research has been conducted in relation to the similar areas of tobacco, alcohol and fast-food marketing [
69‐
71]. The majority of available evidence has been conducted in either the UK or Australia. Therefore, alongside the general paucity of existing research, even less information has been produced in relation to other jurisdictions in which gambling and associated advertising have also been liberalised. Without insight into the unique gambling advertising characteristics of jurisdictions other than the UK and Australia, the associated literature remains culturally homogenous. In addition, there is a corresponding paucity of cross-cultural studies that compare the characteristics of gambling marketing based on varying regulatory approaches between jurisdictions. The current review therefore recommends the growth of such studies within the future literature in congruence with the global expansion of the gambling sphere.
Limitations
The findings of the current review should be considered in light of some potential limitations. Firstly, only studies that were published in the English language were included. Gambling advertising is prevalent across numerous jurisdictions in which English is not the primary language such as Sweden, Spain and France. Therefore, insightful and pertinent studies may have been excluded during the search strategy. Secondly, due to the rapid review methodology utilised, limitations were placed upon the number of databases searched alongside the time dedicated to screening. For example, although the MMAT is a widely used and reputable quality assessment tool [
33], it is acknowledged that more in-depth yet time consuming tools are available. Despite these potential limitations, numerous coders were involved in the screening and quality assessment process in order to reinforce the rigor of the current methodology. Furthermore, the protocol for the current review was registered online alongside the inclusion of a search strategy report (Additional File
1) to increase transparency and trustworthiness.
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.