Gambling Ads Should Trade Celebrity Glitz For Boring, Everyday Realism

I have a brilliant idea for a gambling commercial, though I’m also 100% certain no gambling company is going to pay me for it.

We open in a kitchen. Not a fancy, aspirational, white and chromey kitchen. Just a regular kitchen. Hasn’t been updated since 1987. A man is waiting for water to boil. He takes out his phone, opens an online casino, spins a few slots at 20 cents a pop. The water boils. He puts down the phone and dumps in the pasta.

That’s it. That’s the commercial.

We could do a whole series of these. Another guy puts $5 on a five-leg parlay while sitting on the toilet. A woman is waiting in the pre-K pickup line and dabbles in some Huff N’ Puff instead of having to talk to Linda. Linda is the worst.

You get the idea.

What I’m going for is a gambling commercial that makes gambling look like something a person might do for a little entertainment, to pass some time, to get a little thrill. Because that’s probably how most people gamble on their phone. They putz around, and then they strain the pasta.

But so much gambling advertising makes the whole thing feel enormous. Big personalities, big excitement, the suggestion that opening an app is your entrance into a more interesting life.

It’s not.

DraftKings got close to what I’m talking about last year with its Kenny Rogers ad, the one built around The Gambler and the message that “It’s more fun when it’s for fun.” There are people singing along in everyday settings, although there are also golfers running from an alligator and a tailgater crashing through a table, which, taken separately or together, is still a rather eventful day.

I’m taking the idea further. Make the gambling smaller, make the spending smaller, make stopping the activity part of what happens in the commercial.

To ban, or not to ban

Of course, there are many people who would like to take all this even further — mainly the legislators who want to either ban or severely limit gambling advertising.

There’s no shortage of legislative ideas. New York’s A8925 would ban ads for sportsbooks during live sports broadcasts. New Jersey’s A139 goes after what should be some low-hanging fruit, namely banning gambling ads on websites and apps intended for children under 12.

And the idea to ban gambling advertising isn’t new, as evidenced by U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko’s 2023 Betting on Our Future Act. It proposed banning sportsbook advertising via anything covered by the Federal Communications Commission, which he modeled after the federal cigarette advertising ban.

Which … is interesting, in a “law of unintended consequences” kind of way.

A working paper by Sriniketh Vijayaraghavan of Texas A&M University carries a title that is pretty shocking: “Cigarette Advertising Bans Raised Mortality When Risk Disclosures Ended.”

The paper looks at cigarette advertising bans in 10 countries, with particular attention to the United States. Its finding: The American broadcast ban on ciggie ads led to somewhere between 71,000 and 102,000 additional deaths from lung cancer, laryngeal cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among people who were teenagers after it took effect.

So more people died after the ads left the air? Why?

Because before the 1971 ban, broadcasters running cigarette commercials also had to give airtime to the case against smoking. When the cigarette ads went away, much of the anti-smoking messaging went away with them. Tobacco companies, meanwhile, could still advertise elsewhere.

“An advertising ban intended to protect public health can cause lasting harm if it removes mandated risk disclosures while still allowing companies to continue advertising their products in other media,” Vijayaraghavan wrote.

And before anyone in the gambling business sees the above as an excuse to try to hypnotize me with slot machine ads, the paper found that in countries where there was no mandated anti-smoking messaging to lose, smoking-related deaths went down.

And let’s not forget that despite it usually being in pretty small font, every gambling ad I’ve ever seen includes some RG messaging, as most every state demands it.

The paper’s recommendation considering all this is straightforward: “Regulators should follow the harms a restriction aims to prevent and ensure that protective information continues to reach consumers via the appropriate channels.”

What’cha want?

That seems like a pretty good place to start thinking about gambling advertising. What information do we actually want people to receive?

Personally, I’d like more commercials explaining that gambling is something you spend entertainment money on, with a very real possibility that the money will be gone. Sports bets, slots, blackjack, whatever you enjoy. Have your fun, within your means.

Then do it even more within your means.

Which is why I understand no one in the gambling industry is seeking to make me their ad director.

Furthermore, I realize a teeny-tiny warning attached to a gambling commercial isn’t the same thing as a separate anti-smoking ad. The smoking paper doesn’t prove my pasta commercial would prevent people from — wait for it — boiling over.

But if the industry wants us to believe the responsible gambling message is important — and it should — I’d like to see it get the starring role. Keep Jon Hamm and Kevin Hart and Post Malone, and give us an actual person spending a modest amount of money, enjoying it for a little bit, and being done. Let the commercial show what enough looks like.

Like my commercial. Small stakes, crappy kitchen, Ronzoni box. A person who can lose what he’s playing with and still have the same night he was going to have anyway.