Live-odds gambling advertising and consumer protection

Abstract

In-play gambling is a recent innovation allowing gambling to occur during the course of a sporting event, rather than merely before play commences. For years, in-play gambling has been marketed in the UK via adverts displaying current betting odds during breaks in televised soccer, e.g., “England to score in the first 20 minutes, 4-to-1.” Previous research shows that this so-called “live-odds” advertising is skewed toward complex events with high profit margins which consumers do not evaluate rationally. Recent UK regulatory guidance on “impulsiveness and urgency,” aiming to enhance consumer protection around gambling advertising, states that gambling advertising should not “unduly pressure the audience to gamble.” We explored the frequency and content of live-odds advertising over the 2018 soccer World Cup, as a case study of the first major televised sporting event after the publication of this UK regulatory guidance. In total, 69 live-odds adverts were shown over 32 matches ( M = 2.16 per-match), by five bookmakers. We identified two key features that made advertised bets appear more urgent than necessary. First, 39.1% of bets could be determined before the match ended. Second, 24.6% of bets showed a recent improvement in odds, including a 15.9% subset of “flash odds,” which were limited in both time and quantity. Advertised odds were again skewed toward complex events, with a qualitative trend toward greater complexity than at the previous World Cup. We believe that consumers should be protected against the targeted content of gambling advertising.

Over-Indebtedness and Problem Gambling in a General Population Sample of Online Gamblers

“…Along with concerns raised about online casino gambling, authors have also highlighted the addictive potential of live sports betting, i.e. different types of "inplay" betting during sports events (20). In particular, in-play or live betting has been shown to be associated with a higher degree of problem gambling among sports bettors (21,22); a recent study reported that among sports bettors, problem gambling was seen in as many as 79% of those betting on in-play micro events, compared to only 29% of other bettors (23).…”

Request-a-bet sports betting products indicate patterns of bettor preference and bookmaker profits

“…We decided to focus on the identity and teams of all players requested to score a goal. This is because many gambling adverts for soccer in the UK tend to feature the odds on specific star players scoring a goal (Newall, 2015;Newall et al, 2019). Furthermore, scoring a goal is a clear skill-based measure, which occurred often in the dataset: 1,067 requests identified at least one named player (M 5 1.39) to score at least one goal (M 5 1.07).…”

“…Conventional home-draw-away bets also generally do not provide large potential wins due to the small number of potential outcomes. By contrast, UK gambling advertising around soccer tends to focus on bets at long odds, but which nonetheless require several events, often involving star players from the best teams, in order to payoff (Newall, 2015;Newall, Thobhani, Walasek, & Meyer, 2019). This is relevant given that previous research in cognitive psychology suggests that the probabilities of such typical "representative" events are the most likely to be overestimated (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).…”

Testing a gambling warning label’s effect on behavior

“…Mimicking these adverts was therefore an ecologically-valid way of measuring the warning label's effect on gambling behavior. These adverts tend to promote odds on highly-specific events with high potential payoffs, e.g., -Sergio Aguero to score first and Manchester City to win 1-0,‖ and only sometimes promote less-specific events with lower potential payoffs, e.g., -Manchester City to win‖ (Newall, Thobhani, Walasek, & Meyer, 2019;Newall, 2015;Newall, 2017). Specific events with high potential payoffs can also have exceptionally high bookmaker profit margins (Hassanniakalager & Newall, 2019).…”