Ladbrokes chastised for breaching new UK rules for gambling ads

Entain’s Ladbrokes is the first operator to be found to have breached the new rules on appeal to young people.

UK.- Entain’s Ladbrokes has been told off for breaching new UK rules for gambling adverts. It’s the first operator to have been found in breach of the rules that prohibit ads that have a “strong appeal” to minors. 

The Advertising Standards Authority has banned a Ladbrokes ad that was posted in a tweet in October because it featured several Premier League footballers. The tweet featured the text  “Can these big summer signings make the question marks over their performances go away?” together with a video that featured the footballers Philippe Coutinho, Jesse Lingard and Kalidou Koulibaly.

Gambling adverts were previously prohibited from having “particular appeal” to children, which was defined as a disproportionate appeal to minors when compared to its appeal to adults. However, last year the Committee of Advertising Practice updated its rules and changed the prohibition to ban “strong appeal”, which no longer considers whether an ad appeals more to minors than adults, merely whether it appeals to a large number of minors.

The new rule mainly impacts the use of celebrities in campaigns, with previous guidance having suggested the Premier League footballers were out, with the exception of cases where the audience can be restricted to over 18s only.

Ladbrokes argued that it had “made use of all available targeting and age-gating tools” to make sure that the ad was only seen by those over 18s. It said that its Twitter feed can only be accessed by users who have claimed to be aged 18 or older.

It said it had been additionally cautious by only targeting over 25s to account for the fact that Twitter has no independent method for verifying that the ages users state are correct. It claimed that data from Twitter showed 50,666 ad impressions, 0 per cent of them from users aged under 20.

However, the ASA said that it had decided to uphold the complaint because Twitter’s age verification process was not sufficiently reliable to allow such an ad to be posted. 

It said: “We considered that it would have been acceptable for the ad to appear in a medium where under-18s, for all intents and purposes, could be entirely excluded from the audience. That would apply in circumstances where those who saw the ad had been robustly age-verified as being 18 or older, such as through marketing lists that had been validated by payment data or credit checking. 

“We did not consider that marketing data inferred from user behaviour met that threshold.”

“Because Twitter was a media environment where users self-verified on customer sign-up, and did not use robust age-verification, we considered that Ladbrokes had not excluded under-18s from the audience with the highest level of accuracy required for ads the content of which was likely to appeal strongly to under-18s.

See also: ASA deems Rank and Coral ads “socially irresponsible”