How the APPG’s recommendations might affect marketing activities of UK operators going forward

Most of you will no doubt be aware of the Gambling Related Harm All Party Parliamentary Group report into ‘prohibiting’ gambling in the UK. One common question I have fielded is how this will affect marketing compliance requirements if the recommendation to stop advertising and marketing is adopted.

I’ve already written one article speculating on the ambiguity of the word ‘marketing’ in this context so I won’t go over that again, but to be able to assess the compliance implications, we’ll need to know where affiliates stand. If affiliates are prohibited, they will just fill Google up with reviews of unlicensed operators and we’ll know that ‘protecting vulnerable people and under 18s’ was clearly just a cloak for political agendas to take shape.

The implementation of strict source of wealth checks, reduced features and scaled back entertainment options plus small maximum bets will probably work for some but not for the majority. These players will either go to unlicensed operators, some of which are very good and well-regarded operators or give up gambling. Inevitably, this will result in an exodus of operators from the UK leaving only a few: probably the obvious names.

So, returning to the compliance perspective, whatever happens next, operators will have very limited marketing alternatives and they will need to make sure that those are done both effectively and ethically, by which I mean that any misleading marketing to punters will not be tolerated. I am a fan of the UKGC but one thing they haven’t done quite right up to now is get across the point that the vulnerable gambler could be stopped before they even get to the point of sale. Misleading marketing is still rife and, annoyingly perhaps, most of it isn’t even necessary. It’s just ingrained tried and tested marketing methods that have, from a regulatory perspective, had their day.

Grey area

If operators are prohibited from using affiliates, they won’t need marketing compliance, but they will also lose a lot of ground to unlicensed operators who can and there is only so long you can operate in a market where you can’t compete for new business. After a long period of being locked out of the UK, the stricter regulations mean that the grey market is already getting stronger and the more affiliates that migrate, the more that momentum will increase.

My belief is that they will have affiliates but that what those affiliates can say will be tempered, as is the case in Italy. That of course means that monitoring those voices will become more important for operators unless a licensing regime for affiliates is introduced. I think that too is inevitable, although whether affiliates will want to go to that trouble when there are easier pickings elsewhere remains to be seen.

If I was in an existing operator’s shoes right now, I’d already be looking hard for affiliate issues to avoid any sort of ‘bad actor’ history when the time for a decision comes around. I’d not want to run a gambling business without affiliates that is for sure: it would be impossible to compete but conversely, I’m also not sure I’d want to concentrate my marketing efforts on the UK anymore. The cost of acquisition must be high and can only get worse if the APPG report is taken up.

But the UK isn’t the only jurisdiction that is getting stricter and, in many of them, it is as much about the money as it is player protection. It’s very likely that over the course of the next few years, virtually all territories will have strict rules surrounding online gambling so jumping out of the frying pan might be a bit of…well, a gamble.

It’s hard to be unbiased when I clearly have a vested interest in this area but I think most people would see the common sense in having even a very basic affiliate compliance strategy that can be applied to any territory, even those an operator hasn’t approached yet. We have clients scanning in all sorts of weird and wonderful places because they are both gathering information on the affiliate landscape while also assessing what sort of issues they are likely to face should they go in and the regulators start to get more active.

I’m an optimist, no getting away from that so my view is that the APPG has deliberately cast the net as wide as they can to firstly start a conversation and secondly to see what it reels in. When I first read it, I honestly thought they were being quite savvy and would realise that if this was adopted in its entirety, it would effectively do the exact opposite of what they initially set out to achieve. Having seen the way politicians have behaved during lockdown, I admit now I am worried. I fear this isn’t really about gambling, it’s about being seen to be relevant in a world where everyone feels pressured into showing they care about everything and everyone else.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.