How Data Science is Shaping the Online Gambling Compliance Landscape

One of the primary concerns of reputable online gambling regulators is ensuring that licensees act in accordance with their license terms. One of the most challenging aspects of this oversight is ensuring that the online casino promotes its promotions, bonuses, and other incentives responsibly.

These “responsible gambling ads” must not be attractive to children, should not promise financial security, offer the promise of jackpot wins, and myriad other subtleties that are the staple of any other industry’s marketing campaigns.

How Difficult Can It Be to Check Ads?

On a case-by-case basis, ensuring that a large-scale ad campaign is checked against a set of compliance metrics is not a difficult task at all. The challenge lies in doing it at scale.

Using the United Kingdom as an example, we find that the Gambling Commission approved 2945 gambling licenses as of November 26th, 2022. Of these, 938 have been approved to offer online games of chance and other betting services in the country.

The fact is that with a staff complement of only 250, the UKGC would be stretched beyond measure, manually reviewing and correcting the ad campaigns of nearly 3000 operators. The problem is exacerbated when you consider that these operators are supported by a wide variety of online ad channels, including PPC, paid ad placements, email campaigns, television and radio ads, and casino affiliate portals.

Maintaining a semblance of control over these ad channels has resulted in the emergence of third party compliance companies, such as Rightlander. These compliance-focused entities support brands by monitoring and reporting on the multitude of ads being run across an increasing number of social media platforms, mobile apps and gaming-related websites.

ASA Learns to Leverage Data Science

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is taking a feather out of the cap of firms like Rightlander by leveraging advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate UK advertising better.

In a recent post, the ASA acknowledged the need for AI-drive assistance, stating:

“The scale of digital advertising means it simply isn’t possible to do this comprehensively without taking advantage of machine learning and automation.”

The ASA is beginning a collaborative exercise where it will work with compliance experts to teach its automated system to recognise misleading offers and create parallels between news adverts and those that have been problematic in the past.

This new process will allow the compliance teams to manually review a handful of ads the automated system has flagged as a potential red flag out of the thousands it has tested against its programming.

At GamblersPick, we support activities promoting clear and honest advertising as it protects both the players and the operators, which is necessary for the industry's sustainability.