The UK Cracking Down on Gambling Adverts Targeting Children

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Authorities in the United Kingdom have had quite the month as they try to sanitize the country’s humongous online gambling industry to make sure it not only remains safe and fair for legal gamblers but also that children and other people at risk of online gambling are protected. A little over a week ago the UK Gambling Commission took a bold step forward by unveiling a new set of rules and guidelines that its licensees will have to adhere to as from May 7. Now, other authorities in the country are also joining the fight to improve the UK’s online gambling industry.

This time, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), are the ones taking the fight to the gaming operators through a new set of restrictions all of which have been designed specifically to address the issue of underage gambling. The new rules prohibit online gambling operators from publishing gambling-related ads to individuals who are likely to be under the legal gambling age (18) based on data from their browsing behavior or online interests.

Restricted Content

Both organizations went further to lists the various types of content that will be unacceptable in advertisements going forwards. These include animated or cartoon characters, licensed characters from TV shows or movies, as well as celebrities and sports people which are likely to, in one way or the other, appeal to children – even references to youth culture will no longer be allowed. In addition to this, the gambling operators will be prohibited from publishing gambling ads featuring celebrities, sportspeople, and characters who either are or appear to be below 25 years of age.

Existing standards on responsible gambling advertisements already stipulated that operator have to make sure that their ads do not target children regardless of the platform they would be published. Needless to say, most of these standards were rather ambiguous, to say the least, and therefore malicious operators managed to find workarounds to push their adverts. The new principles are, thankfully, more clear-cut and thus it will be extremely difficult for operators to play at the margins of regulatory compliance as they have always done.

“Our new standards respond to the latest evidence and lessons from ASA rulings, and require that greater care is taken in the placement and content of gambling ads to ensure they are not inadvertently targeted at under 18s,” CAP director Shahriar Coupal said.

These new standards are expected to go live in April and come five years after the CAP commissioned a review of the impact that gambling-related advertising could have on children. The review unveiled a number of complaints that were filed with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) regarding a worrying number of ads that were considered to have some kind of appeal to children. This has further been elevated by the presence of the so-called loot boxes in many video games.

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