ASA Survey Reveals Less Underage Exposure of Gambling Ads on TV

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), has released a report indicating that the exposure of children to televised gambling promotions in the United Kingdom is at a 12-year low, since 2008. The significant drop is however attributed to the fact that children have been watching less TV over the past years after switching to online content.

The ASA, a self-regulatory organization of the advertising industry in the UK published the numbers last week in a report titled Children’s exposure to age-restricted TV ads: 2019 update. In this report, the non-governmental advertising ombudsman disclosed that the number of minors in the UK exposed to gambling-related ads on TV has dropped significantly since 2013. Back then (in 2013) children aged between 4 and 15 years watched 229.3 gambling ads every week, compared to 2019 which saw the figure fall by close to 50% to 115.9 ads each week.

Crunching the Numbers

Based on ASA’s exhaustive report, the rate of exposure to age-restricted gambling content by kids on TV stood at 2.7 gambling ads in 2009, compared to 2019 when children viewed an average of 2.5 gambling promotional material on TV each week. Moreover, 2019’s exposure rates were a massive decline from 2013’s peak records when an average of 4.4 gambling advertisements were viewed by minors per week.

Compare to adults, the rate of children’s exposure to the gambling promotions aired on TV in 2019 stood at a little over 17%, which is also the lowest rate recorded since ASA started keeping track of the trends 12 years ago. Essentially this is an indicator that for every 5 gambling commercials that were viewed by adults on TV , kids saw roughly one of the gambling promotions. Nevertheless, while 2019’s rate of this exposure has gone down, it is still slightly higher than that of 2008, which was 2.2 gambling adverts per week.

The ASA report also revealed that these gambling promotions were barely 2% of all the commercials that minors viewed on TV. Looking at specific gambling product ads viewed in 2019, bingo took the top spot with 0.9 ads per week, lottery products at 0.8, online casino at 0.5, and finally sports betting at 0.3 advertisements every week.

More Children are Turning Away from TV 

While these numbers could be an indicator that the current regulations governing TV advertising are helping with restricting minors from viewing age-inappropriate content, the ASA has also noted that the media consumption habits of children are changing. Kids have been gradually switching to internet-based media which includes the likes of on-demand streaming services and social media platforms. For instance, compared in 2019, kids spent an average of 7.5 hours watching TV every week, compared to 17.6 hours of TV viewership back in 2010.

As such, the independent advertising watchdog recognized that this was a wake-up call for the body to stay sharp in the monitoring of the promotion of age-restricted content across these other forms of media. In light of that development, the ASA has already started rolling out a new form of technology that will help in policing the exposure of kids to adverts that actively promote age-restricted content via the internet, and taking the necessary measures should a problem be identified.