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The ASA Calls Foul on UK Football Gambling Tweet
By Shane Addinall Dec 24, 2022 LegalityThe ASA ordered a popular UK gambling site to remove a red-flagged video ad from Twitter. Is the UK going to have to up the ante to force operators to stop testing the boundaries of what is acceptable?The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is well-known for its vigilance and diligence in addressing content that fails to meet its requirements.
With Great Britain’s drive to protect at-risk communities from predatory gambling ads, the region made it illegal for online gambling providers to feature sports personalities and other celebrities in ads that strongly appeal to viewers not of the legal gambling age.
ASA Calls Foul on Football-Themed Ad
The ASA ordered LC International Ltd, which trades as Ladbrokes, to remove a video Tweet that violates the Committee on Advertising Practice (CAP) rules.
The ASA described the offending advertisement as follows:
“A promoted tweet for Ladbrokes featured the text “Can these big summer signings make the question marks over their performances go away?”. The tweet contained an embedded video showing an image reel of Premier League footballers Philippe Coutinho, Jesse Lingard and Kalidou Koulibaly, set against a background of question marks, with the text “Ladbrokes” within the image box itself.”
According to the official ASA statement, the advertisement was not only aired organically but had been a boosted ad where the operator paid to extend the post's reach. This additional investment saw it reach more than 50,000 Twitter users.
The Operator Defends Their Goal Post
While it is clear to anyone that this ad would be considered in contravention of the CAP requirements and should never have been approved, Ladbrokes defended the advertisement.
The operator admitted that the ad featured personalities deemed high-risk, so they used the social media platform's age-gating data and demographic targeting tools to reach adults over 25.
They also did not include any “calls to action, promotional offers or links” that would allow a person to view the ad and immediately click through to the Ladbrokes website.
Red Cards Are the Order of the Day
Despite their protestations, the ASA found the company’s defence of what they admitted to knowing was a high-risk ad to be weak.
They specifically took issue with the argument that the operator used Twitters age verification data and targeting to reach the intended audience, saying:
“We did not consider that marketing data inferred from user behaviour met that threshold. Because Twitter was a media environment where users self-verified on customer sign-up and did not use robust age verification.”
The agency explained that for a company's age-verification process to be robust, it would have to verify the age of its users through "marketing lists that had been validated by payment data or credit checking". At the same time, the platform in question allows the user to enter any age they like without in-depth verification.
For this reason, they found the company to be in breach of its advertising standards, saying:
“We considered that Ladbrokes had not excluded under-18s from the audience with the highest level of accuracy required for ads the content, which was likely to appeal strongly to under-18s.”
Their final comment on the situation was that the advertisement was deemed irresponsible and in breach of the CAP code.
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