Gambling advertising: Time to be anti-social about social media?

We are living in a moment which will probably one day be seen as a significant one. The internet has arguably been the catalyst for that by providing a platform to make ourselves heard. The result is a clamouring for more tolerance, for more people to take responsibility for their actions, more awareness of social issues, blame culture and a younger generation embroiled in a social world that judges them on their appearance, their opinion and their ambition. Even Tim Berners-Lee recently stated that this was not what he hoped for. It is probably then of no surprise that industries such as ours come under increased scrutiny after a period of relative freedom. Perhaps if we had spotted what was coming, we might have self-policed ourselves better rather than get into a bonus fight with all and sundry.

Gambling has always been an easy target for politicians and journalists trying to garner votes or advance their careers and the industry’s bonus culture has only exacerbated this. But at least those two elements tend to back up their arguments with research, even if some of it is manipulated to suit, and sometimes their arguments carry validity. But the social bandwagon brings into play a range of voices who may care less but can still impact decision makers.

I raise this subjective opinion off the back of a recent social post in my feed that highlighted the fact that a Paddy Power advert had appeared on a child’s Facebook page. As you can imagine, some people were outraged – or at least, they pretended to be. “How could they do this? Are they stupid?”.

Ad targeting

Now personally speaking, I don’t think gambling companies should be advertising on social media platforms at all. Gambling isn’t really a social pastime and those platforms have a large audience that shouldn’t be gambling. But what was interesting to me was how people immediately jumped to the conclusion that Paddy Power would deliberately look to present ads to under 18s. In the current climate that seems ludicrous to even consider. It also made me realise that we have become so reliant on social technology that we just assume it is perfect when, in fact, this specific example is way more likely to be down to the way Facebook operates.

Ads on social media in particular are highly targeted and advertisers have incredibly detailed control over the demographics they want their ad to appear to. They input this data, they pay Facebook to do what they ask and they accept the terms and conditions – which probably state that actually this may not work quite as you expect and if it doesn’t that’s your problem not ours.

In this case, my educated guess is that the parent who exposed this issue uses the same IP address as their child, possibly even the same tablet or computer and that Facebook’s algorithms didn’t – or couldn’t – pick this up. So, it begs the question, at what point in time do advertising platforms take some responsibility for how content is delivered? After all, they derive significant revenue from the activity and they are always keen to resist any form of regulatory interruption and there seems to be a reluctance among regulators to force the issue from what I can see.

Most social advertising platforms remain a closed book to compliance scanners and those responsible for checking compliant marketing and although a recent report to the EU commission has recently highlighted this as an issue, there is no sign of it opening up yet.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.