Young people’s awareness, critique and resistance to gambling marketing through sport

The dominant theoretical approaches to understanding gambling and addiction are psychological. In contrast to this, we situate our work in the broader socio-cultural approaches to gambling (Abbott et al., 2018) and an emerging literature on what has been called the ‘gamblification’ of games, sport and media (Macey and Hamari, 2022). This paper presents findings from an ongoing mixed-methods project from the border regions on the island of Ireland that explores both the exposure, awareness and perceptions of young people to gambling marketing communicated through sport and the strategies used by gambling companies in their marketing communications.

First, nine focus groups were conducted with 70 young people (14-24 years). This assisted us to identify live sporting events of interest to our young people and the broadcast and social media platforms that they used most frequently to access this content. Second, mass media broadcasts of major sports events across public service, commercial and subscription television channels in both regions (n=18) were recorded and analysed. Third, a purposeful sample of Instagram posts (N: 178) from 7 major gambling brands’ social media accounts accessible on the island of Ireland were collected and analysed.

Our focus group findings suggest that young people predominantly use smartphones and social media to consume sport and through this they encounter gambling marketing. From our media analysis, gambling operators utilise sports consumption as a vehicle for marketing by connecting with sports fans through the distribution of themed social media content related to sport. We also observed the use of influencers online to promote gambling. However, these strategies were most prominent for football, horse racing and darts, and almost exclusively for male athletes.

Nevertheless, focus group data painted a mixed reception for both sports, sponsors and celebrity influencers and their association with gambling. While the communications strategies did indeed appeal to several of the focus group attendees, a number rejected the associations, critiquing the chances of the claims occurring (i.e. winning) and questioning whether gambling was a good fit for sport. This vein of resistance indicates that young people critique harmful industry communications and formulate their own views.

Our emerging findings point to the need for forthcoming gambling marketing policies to go beyond national broadcast television operators and to engage with transnational mass and social media marketing and operators. They also point to the need to update gambling harms programmes to address online social media strategies and sponsorships in certain sports.