A ban on online gambling advertising has little or no impact on regular and heavy players, a study in the Netherlands has shown.
A thesis on the subject by a former University of Amsterdam economics student, Marcel Wieting, won the Dutch Gambling Authority’s annual award for his work.
It showed that a ban on advertising is effective in displacing online gambling advertising to unpopular websites. The effect of this is to make the advertising largely useless for recruiting new players.
But even with no marketing at all, regular and heavy players will continue to use online gambling services, so those players could be targeted through the gambling app or simply by email, said Wieting. This means that gambling advertising restrictions will only have very limited impact.
