Connecting With Sports Fans: Gambling Marketing Strategies On Instagram

Aim and Research Questions
Our research questions how major gambling operators utilise sports media consumption as a vehicle for marketing and brand building on Instagram.

Theoretical Background and Literature Review
Social media platforms have become a prominent space for the proliferation of commercial messaging, including gambling. These platforms enable gambling operators not only to promote their services via platform-based advertising but also to build and position their brand. Accordingly, there is a growing multidisciplinary literature on the use of social media in gambling marketing (James and Bradley, 2021). Previous research has explored gambling operators’ use of multiple platforms (Lindeman et al., 2023) and of Twitter particularly, exploring their content strategies (Houghton et al., 2019) and engaging in sentiment analysis of the content (Bradley and James, 2019). Despite Instagram’s increasing interest in the sports marketing and communication (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2018), sports gambling marketing via Instagram however has been less explored. Marketing through Instagram provides important impression management content that when combined with relationship marketing tactics can build brands and position social media influencers in the minds of consumers (Doyle, et al., 2022).
Research Design, Methodology and Data Analysis
This paper presents findings from a larger mixed methods research project that examines young sport consumer’s understanding of the relationship between sport and gambling mediated through and live sport on the island of Ireland.

First, between February and July 2023 we conducted 9 focus groups with 71 young people aged between 14-24 from the border regions of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. These findings provided insights into the participants’ sports media consumption and their exposure, awareness and perceptions of gambling marketing and its relationship with sport. From this we identified live sporting events of interest to these young people (i.e., football, rugby, darts, athletics, and horseracing) and social media platforms that they used to access this content (i.e., Instagram, YouTube). Instagram was selected for further analysis as it had the highest percentage (n=18, 94.7%) of usage among 18-24 years olds in our focus groups and the platform allows targeting those over 18 years old for branded content on gambling.

We collected a purposeful sample of posts, including image (N: 99) and video (N: 79), shared between October 2023 and early January 2024 from 7 major gambling brands’ Instagram accounts and accessible across the island of Ireland. The posts, including their captions, were collected through taking screenshots and screen recordings.

To analyse the data, we developed a codebook building on previous work (Lindeman et al., 2023; Rossi et al., 2023) and the qualitative data was managed through MAXQDA.
Results/Findings and Discussion **
Findings suggest that gambling operators utilise sports media consumption as a vehicle for marketing by connecting with sports fans through native social media content related to sport. However, the extent of this marketing varied depending on the sport, with men’s football, horse racing and darts most saturated by gambling marketing, while other sports received little attention from the gambling operators. The fact that there is little to no reference to women’s sports in the collected Instagram posts possibly reinforces the gendered nature of gambling marketing through sport.

One prominent brand-building strategy of operators is to share content in a variety of different genres and sports content not directly related to gambling to increase engagement. Such content includes informative content related to upcoming sports events and statistics, entertainment content like sport-related humorous sketches amongst others. This content drives greater audience engagement compared to responsible gambling messages and general content. One particular gambling operator, which has the most followers compared to other operators included in this research, stands out in the platform's algorithmic cultures by producing creative and relatable Instagram reels that appeal to a wide audience, increasing brand visibility and recognition.

While all operators share generic responsible gambling (RG) messages these are mostly messages which display RG taglines such as Take Time to Think or messages which display RG organisation names and/or RG helplines. Indeed, our analysis has shown that such messages are often obscured when viewed on social media accounts on smartphones. Less prevalent are messages about gambling harms or those which give detailed information about RG tools where users can place limits on session length, losses, spending or deposits (Lopez-Gonzalez, et al., 2018).
Conclusion, Contribution, and Implication *
Our findings demonstrate that the distribution of native social media content on Instagram increases the exposure of some young adults who enjoy consuming sports media to gambling marketing. Unlike televised live sporting events that provide an avenue for distributing direct gambling messages, social media platforms such as Instagram facilitate the distribution of a wide variety of content types that not only seek to capture the attention of adult and youth sports fans, but also users who would not typically engage with gambling content. Overall, our analysis of gambling marketing content on Instagram has found that the attempts to reinforce the dominant industry narrative that gambling is a normal part of sport fandom and a normal ‘leisure industry’. As with many industries, however, they carefully concealed obfuscate the individual and social harms that they generate.

This study provides important insights into how gambling brands use social media, in particular Instagram, to potentially bypass existing regulations preventing gambling communications being viewed by children and young people under 18 years. It furthers a growing body of evidence that documents the extent of gambling marketing that young people are exposed to and how gambling companies exploit fandom to target both gamblers and non-gamblers alike.


Keywords: gambling marketing, sports media, Instagram, gender, young people, children

References
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8. Rossi, R., Wheaton, J., Moxey, M., & Tozzi, E. (2023, September). New season, more self regulation, more marketing: the prevalence of gambling adverts during the opening weekend of the English premier league 2023/2024. University of Bristol.