New research from the Canadian Gaming Association (CGA) suggests that regulatory policies around gambling advertising are evolving at a faster rate than relevant evidence and warns the misalignment could lead to regulations that are wide of the mark.

The CGA, along with leaders from GP Consulting and Eilers & Krejcik, published a comprehensive research paper evaluating gambling advertising and regulatory intervention.

The idea was to undertake what the CGA called a “rapid review” of available academic literature on the responsible gambling-related impacts of sports betting and online gaming advertising. The CGA notes that “rapid reviews” are recognized by the World Health Organization and governments worldwide as efficient tools for informing health policy and communicating information to stakeholders.

The paper drew upon dozens of academic, peer-reviewed publications from the last 10 years that researched exposure to gambling advertising and its impact on consumers’ gambling behaviours. The report’s authors noted that while they are skeptical of how useful a lot of the research is in practice, “we do view the existing literature as helpful in informing responsible gambling policy and practices in several areas.”

“In aggregate, our findings highlight a distinct trend: regulatory policies are evolving at a faster rate than the accompanying evidence base,” summarized the report. “We caution that this misalignment may lead to regulations that are either overreaching relative to their intended goals or insufficiently nuanced, thus failing to address the subtleties of modern gambling advertising practices.”

“Regulatory policies are evolving at a faster rate than the accompanying evidence base… This misalignment may lead to regulations that are either overreaching relative to their intended goals or insufficiently nuanced.”

The CGA added that policy can be shaped by “fulfilling cultural expectations that depart from empirical findings or broader scientific theory” but warned that “policymakers should be made aware of where evidence ends, and social preferences begin.”

In particular, it highlighted several key areas for a proposed research agenda:

• Responsible gambling advertising
• Developing frameworks to promote consistency in measurement and reporting given that objectively measuring exposure and outcomes can be challenging
• Conducting designs in real-world settings
• Addressing cultural bias – research from more established gambling markets should not be generalized to less mature markets
• Understanding the direction of causality
• Considering in future research how both exposure to advertising and behavioural outcomes can be measured objectively
• Combining established theories from the gambling and advertising sectors
• Living systematic reviews, instead of traditional systematic reviews, which provide a snapshot of the literature at a single point in time

Paper seeks to provide evidence amid ongoing advertising debate

The CGA noted in its summary that in the evolving Canadian gambling landscape, there is a growing interest in understanding the role of marketing and the effectiveness of the advertising regulatory framework.

The report was commissioned to provide some evidence to contribute to the ongoing conversation around the perceived merits and dangers of what some observers have described as a proliferation of online gaming and betting advertising in Ontario since the province opened its regulated online gaming market in April 2022.

Advertising has been a prominent topic of discussion both within the industry and from the outside looking in over recent months.

A panel at June’s Canadian Gaming Summit featuring CGA President and CEO Paul Burns and research experts from Ipsos concluded that issues around advertising begin with considerable “confusion” among consumers over the differences between regulated and unregulated gambling offerings, why they are seeing advertising in their geographical region, and more. That confusion and the lack of suitable national frameworks creates “noise” that can obfuscate the issue, concluded several panelists.

The CGA’s new research comes at a time when Bill S-269, the National Framework on Advertising for Sports Betting Act, sits dormant in federal parliament. Earlier this year, Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications members debated the issue, with some lawmakers voicing concerns about whether they should try to put sports betting advertising back in the box and, if so, how.

Sen. Marty Deacon’s Bill S-269, which had its second Senate reading in May, would require the development of a national framework for sports betting advertising based around what Deacon calls “reasonable limits.”

Burns wrote in a letter published by Canadian Gaming Business magazine in May that the CGA will continue working “to ensure that future changes are driven by facts and evidence versus emotion.”