The evidence was in last year, when the UK Gambling Commission’s behaviour, awareness and attitudes survey showed that the number one quality sought by the betting public in a gambling company was a fair and trustworthy reputation. In the face of heavier regulation and the continued levying of penalties for customer diligence breaches, some major firms are sitting up and taking notice, at least in terms of the need for a rebrand. William Hill recently ran their No Harm campaign, and now Sky Bet are launching another round of advertising geared at promoting the services it provides its players in order to make gambling safer. Both firms have been hit by recent UKGC penalties for breaches in customer care.
In Sky Bet’s case, it was a £1 million penalty package for self-declared social responsibility failures. To their credit, they volunteered the information; had they not done so, it could have led to a far larger fine. The scandal involved failures in their self-exclusion systems, amongst other matters.
Sky Bet have now opted to run a full TV advertising campaign focusing on the three new tools they now offer to players to help ensure a safer gambling environment. The ad features sports pundits Charlie Nicholas, Matt Le Tissier and Phil Thompson, dressed in football shirts with the tools’ logos branded onto them, explaining the three features.
The system allows players to set daily, weekly, and 30-day deposit limits on their accounts, to set a cooling off period of up to 30 days’ self-exclusion, and to easily view total profits and losses on one’s account over any given time period. Sky Bet also displays its responsible gambling slogan, “When the fun stops, stop” at the beginning and end of the ad, as well as a voiceover saying, “Betting should never get in the way of your enjoyment of sport.”
I’m not sure how much Nicholas, Le Tissier and Thompson enjoyed being described as “simple tools,” but the tongue-in-cheek tone aside, the ad deserves praise for being exclusively focused on responsible gambling, something we need more of at the forefront of gambling advertising. It is not as far-reaching as Will Hill’s No Harm campaign, which promised nine measures to try to drastically reduce harm across many areas of the industry, including collaboration and conversation with other firms, but it’s a step in the right direction for Sky Bet, and an expensive commitment, given the current cost of TV advertising in the UK.
The firm plans to spend £3.5 million on the ad campaign. As CEO Flint stated to the press, “Advertising forms a part of an increasingly multi-channel dialogue with the public in order to keep making betting and gaming safer, and that’s what we are doing here.”
