British World Cup viewers were exposed to almost 90 minutes of betting adverts during the tournament, prompting claims that children are being bombarded with messages encouraging them to gamble. ITV carried more than eight and a half hours of advertisements from the start of the tournament to England's semi-final clash with Croatia, of which just under an hour and a half were advertising betting.
This is equivalent to 17% of World Cup ad breaks, or roughly one minute in every six, with the 172 betting spots combined lasting nearly the length of a football match. Bookmakers and online casino companies enjoyed one and a half times as much screen time as alcohol firms and almost four times that of fast food outlets.
A government review of gambling regulation published earlier this year shied away from suggesting curbs on gambling adverts, citing insufficient evidence that adverts for betting were causing harm to children and vulnerable people. However, Labour's deputy leader, Tom Watson, and the charity GambleAware said this was partly due to a lack of funding for research into gambling adverts since they were deregulated in 2007, under Tony Blair's government.
Watson said: 'One of the only downsides to this brilliant World Cup has been the bombardment of gambling advertising on TV and social media that thousands of children will have been exposed to. With an estimated 25,000 children under 16 addicted to gambling, there is nowhere near enough work being done to study the effects of this advertising.' He added that Labour would impose a mandatory levy on the industry to fund increased research, education and treatment of gambling addiction and the effects of advertising.
GambleAware, funded via a voluntary levy on gambling firms of 0.1% of revenue, has backed a mandatory tax because it does not receive enough money to fund research and treatment for problem gamblers, estimated to number more than 400,000 in the UK. It has only recently commissioned the first major piece of research, conducted by the University of Stirling and Ipsos Mori, into the effects of gambling ads being deregulated more than 10 years ago. The studies are not due to be complete until next year.
The GambleAware chief executive, Marc Etches, said: 'In the absence of evidence, the concern is that this is an adult activity and young people are growing up with it being normalised. They get exposed to it on television around sports, advertising online and gambling activities within [computer] games. It seems to have gone too far.'
