The Advertising Standards Authority has reprimanded BetVictor over an advert which the regulator challenged for its appeal to younger audiences.
The paid-for advert in question was seen by the ASA on Facebook in January and featured Barcelona footballers Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets.
The question “Who is the most underrated player at the club you support?” featured on the ad, as did the BetVictor logo and text supporting the brand.
The ASA said it breached the Committee on Advertising Practice guidelines and has upheld the complaint after rejecting a range of statements from BetVictor in its defence.
The operator claimed Alba and Busquets fell into the medium-risk category of footballers – as defined by the CAP code – as opposed to high-risk. It added that while the pair won the World Cup and the European Championships with Spain in 2010 and 2012, respectively, people who witnessed or had a connection to those events would now be over 18.
Among other statements, BetVictor also claimed that the advert was paid-for so it was only targeted at people aged 25 or over – and said data from Facebook revealed that 100 per cent of the viewers of the post were over 25.
However, the ASA upheld its complaint, with the CAP code as of October 2022 insisting that marketing communications for gambling products must not be likely to be of strong appeal to children or young people, especially in connection with youth culture.
The ASA said in connection to footballers Alba and Busquets featuring on the advert: “Those who played at an elite level, especially those who were successful internationally, were therefore likely to appeal strongly to children.”
“Because Facebook was a media environment where users self-verified on customer sign-up, and did not use robust age-verification, we considered that BetVictor had not excluded under-18s from the audience with the highest level of accuracy required for ads the content of which was likely to appeal strongly to under-18s,” the statement added.
