UK gambling operators spend most of their marketing budgets online

Anti-gambling advocates in the UK have been very busy, and very successful, over the past the couple of years. Not only have they nudged Parliament into lowering the stakes at fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs), they’ve also influenced some major changes in how gambling operators advertise. Earlier this month, the Remote Gaming Association (RGA) self-imposed severe restrictions on televised gambling advertising in an effort to stay ahead of even more severe restrictions that might have come from the Government.
It’s a chaotic situation to be sure but televised gambling ads, it turns out, are just a tiny fraction of most operators ad budgets. According to a recent analysis from GambleAware, most operators spend about 80 percent of their marketing budgets on online advertising.
Television advertising accounts for just 15 percent of the money gambling operators spend on advertising. That number, however, turns out to be a whopping £234 million ($298.2 million USD).
A much larger amount of the total, about 48 percent, is spent on direct online marketing. That number comes in at an astounding £747 million ($952 million USD) annually. And that number does not include the £149 million ($190 million USD) that’s spent on social media advertising – a number that’s tripled over the past three years.
The report also revealed a figure that won’t be particularly surprising to anyone who follows the casino affiliate business. Spending on affiliate marketing is pretty much static, rising only 2 percent in the last year. But that doesn’t mean they’re not still spending a lot of cash on affiliate marketing. Gambling operators spent more than £300 million ($382 million) on affiliate marketing in the past year.
All these numbers suggest that anti-gambling advocates who complain about excessive television advertising are really missing the big picture, or that they just have an axe to grind against the gaming industry and don’t really care much one way or the other where it gets ground.