Avoiding reaching unintended audiences is key for marketeers in risky product sectors, such as alcohol, gambling, tobacco and nicotine. In a sense their license to operate depends on their ability to avoid reaching those audiences which society has deemed inappropriate for the particular product or service offered. A recent ruling from the UK's Advertising Standards Authority in the gambling context provides some helpful guidance for marketeers and their advisers in how to steer clear of trouble for the brand.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) tightened the rules on content for gambling ads in October 2022, when it moved from prohibiting ads with “particular appeal” to children to require that such ads should not have “strong appeal” to under 18s.
In a ruling announced in August, Ladbrokes fell foul of this new standard, despite its apparent due diligence. The ruling addressed a series of tweets from Ladbrokes featuring Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Nick Kyrgios and Stefanos Tsitsipas, tennis players who had all appeared in a Grand Slam final in the previous year.
Ladbrokes responded to the ASA detailing the efforts that they had made to ensure that they stayed on the right side of the line with the ads. These efforts included reviewing each player’s media profile, follower demographic, and sponsorship partnerships to assess whether the players would be likely to strongly appeal to under 18s. They found that the players had hardly any followers on Twitter under 21, indicating, in their view, that the players appealed to adults rather than minors. They supported this conclusion with evidence regarding the sponsors of the players, including Djokovic’s deals with car, watch and banking sponsors.
However, the ASA concluded that because of their fame and success the players were “high risk” and therefore likely to have strong appeal to under 18s (see ASA Guidance). Ladbrokes’ due diligence efforts were noted by the ASA, but since Twitter users self-verified on customer sign-up, and the platform did not use robust age-verification, they had not excluded the under 18s from the audience with the required accuracy for ads which were likely to appeal strongly to this age group.
Those ads could have appeared in a robustly age verified environment, but on Twitter they were prohibited as irresponsible. Some useful guidance here, then, for those in the gambling and other adult-only product sectors.
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