Hey, sports fans: You spend up to 20% of every game watching gambling advertising
CBC
Anyone who watches sports is used to seeing betting ads during games, but a collaboration between CBC's Marketplace and British researchers at the University of Bristol found gambling messages fill up to 21 per cent of each broadcast, on average, based on an analysis that looked at seven games.
Marketplace asked the researchers to count the number of gambling messages — including betting company logos, commercials, sponsored segments and any time betting odds appeared on screen — viewers were exposed to during five NHL games and two NBA games broadcast live on television between Oct. 25 and Oct. 29.
An average hockey or basketball broadcast runs roughly three hours. The research team reviewed footage for all seven broadcasts, and also reviewed any available pre-game show, which usually ran about half an hour.
Their study tallied 3,537 gambling messages across all broadcasts, or about 2.8 every minute, totalling one-fifth of the viewing time.
"It's shocking the amount of gambling-related messages that bombard the audience when they're just trying to watch a game," said Jamie Wheaton, who studies gambling at the University of Bristol and led the research on the NHL/NBA games with Raffaello Rossi.
More than 90 per cent of the logos or references were found directly on the playing surface, or court- or rink-side.
FanDuel was the brand with the most messages across the seven broadcasts, accounting for more than a quarter of the total gambling messages in the study.
Markus Giesler, a professor of marketing at York University in Toronto, reviewed the results and said he's worried about how seamless the integration of sports and gambling has become.
"All of this is contributing to the normalization of gambling," Giesler said. "Something that we conventionally think of as a very risky and a very dangerous practice [is framed] as something that's actually just fun and harmless."
Wheaton, Rossi and their colleagues did similar work counting gambling advertisements during the opening weekend of English Premier League soccer games in the U.K. this past August. They found nearly five messages per minute across 24 hours of coverage and described the advertising as "inescapable."
Ontario is the only province with a regulated market for private gambling companies to operate in. Regulated casino and sports betting in all other Canadian regions is handled through a provincially run website.
Since Ontario launched the regulated market in April 2022, gambling has exploded in the province. iGaming Ontario, which manages this market, reported players wagered more than $14 billion in the second quarter of 2022/23. Since the launch of the regulated market, revenues for gambling companies have more than tripled, from a total of $162 million as of June 30, 2022, to more than $540 million by Sept. 30, 2023.
Companies like FanDuel have apps where users can sign up to place bets on a variety of sports or play virtual slot machines. iGaming Ontario takes a share of the money made by operators through these activities.
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