All bets are off: why the Guardian’s ban on gambling ads is worth supporting
Serving up digital advertising with sports journalism can have damaging consequences. It’s something we at the Guardian want to avoid – and give our readers the chance to avoid, too
You will no doubt have heard the gambling industry’s famous slogan: “When the fun stops: stop.” This has never seemed like a very good motto, even for the gambling industry, which has somehow managed to wheedle the word “fun” into its own public health warning.
For one thing it puts a full stop on pretty much every form of human activity. Nothing is ever unstoppably fun. Rolling inside a giant soap bubble down a mountainside made entirely from parmesan cheese while being served high-end savoury canapés by a team of elite stand up comedians. Fine for a while, but it’s probably going to start feeling a little awkward and forced after the first five hours or so.
Fun is a marketing tool. So when your key strapline involves stopping when it stops, then maybe this isn’t about fun at all, but something more sinister. And perhaps it’s something the industry itself needs to take more responsibility for.
This is the best thing, in my opinion, about the Guardian’s decision to stop taking gambling adverts. Sport has become such a politically charged entity that there is a tendency to “other side” every issue. Oh, so you think it’s bad to have a football club owned by a despotic monarchy known to dismember its political opponents: and yet you still wear leather shoes. Explain that.
By contrast this is not a grey issue, no matter how hard those who work in the industry might try to make it one. Aggressively marketed online gambling, always available, a constant gabbling soundtrack to every single sporting event: this is purely parasitic.
It contributes nothing to the spectacle beyond a demonstrable wider harm, from financial distress and mental health issues, to referred problems for those affected by gambling addiction in others. Gambling has been introduced by stealth as a key part of experiencing sport for a generation of young people, replacing, say, collecting football cards as a shared activity during a tournament summer.
You can try to other-side this too. You can point to the money gambling pumps into sport, which doesn’t generally need it to survive. You can say, hey we’re all grown-ups. Maybe I like the odd punt, Mr Scold. It’s a free country. Which is true. But on the other hand I also like drinking, smoking and shooting guns. But it might be a bit weird to have these things marketed relentlessly by glamorous athletes at events attended by children under the age of 10.
Some will point out that it is the government’s job to regulate this, not a news website. But it turns out the government is – and this might come as a surprise – absolutely hopeless at this, as is the Premier League. Recently there was a UK Advertising Standards Association case which established that Peter Crouch is unappealing to children. The ASA concluded the Crouch had “overwhelmingly adult commercial appeal”, basically so he can keep on gurning away pushing smartphone gambling stuff at sports events. Meanwhile the Premier League has finally cracked down on advertising gambling websites on the front of shirts. But don’t worry. You can still do it on the sleeves!
For now it is the job of individuals, and of individual companies to decide where they draw the line. Your employer won’t always do things you wholeheartedly agree with. But this time the Guardian is spot on. The cost is too great.
Which does bring us to the one downside. This is not actually a rational commercial decision. It is literally saying no to easy money, opening up the question of how exactly we’re going to replace that money while funding the continued operation of an occasionally quite good sports-based news website entity.
And so, having spent 600 words jibing at the gambling industry for taking money from impressionable people at the click of an online button, it falls to me to ask Guardian readers if they might consider (ahem) clicking on the link that allows them to support this entire free news media enterprise.
This is the other side of this message. If you think refusing gambling ads is a good position to take, or even if you don’t, but support our right to make it, there is an opportunity here to show it.
If you think our writers, reporters and livebloggers deserve to be properly funded – and not by gambling money – then there is a chance to show that too. It isn’t much of a gamble. Contribute to the Guardian and you get a guaranteed return on the same endlessly regurgitating stream of award winning sport-type content, not to mention occasional notes of grudgingly permissive fun.
And all of it marginally less annoying without the vast severed head of Ray Winstone urging you to get your acca sorted. Click on the button if this seems like something worth doing. Keep reading even if you don’t. And thanks for following this far.