The Decibel - Why sports betting ads are everywhere

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

A federal law banning single-sports betting was reversed last year through Bill C-218, leading to a proliferation of sports betting companies operating in Canada – along with an explosion in sports betting ads on social media, billboards, and in televised sports games.Ben Mussett looked into how this change comes at a time when other countries, like the U.K., have decided to curb sports betting advertising because of concerns about addiction and problem gambling.

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Well, I'm a sports fan myself. I think I first kind of noticed the influx of ads happening in the spring when I was watching the hockey playoffs. That's Ben Mussett. He was a reporter on our summer staff, and he's talking about sports betting. And the weird thing for me was that there weren't just ads during commercial breaks and on billboards. There were, but I found it odd that there was actually like betting content and kind of promotion of different betting companies during the broadcast. You had people like betting analysts coming on, updating people on live odds. This is the SMBets Big Board presented by Bet365. We have some action late. It was Jake Muzzin's 10th career playoff goal. How did that affect the betting markets?

Well, the Maple Leafs are now minus 270 favorites on the money line. You've got Tampa Bay coming back. And you had sportcasters kind of referencing different features on different apps. And that was just completely new to me. Ads for sports betting in Canada seem to be everywhere now, during games, on social media, even on public transit, especially if you're in Ontario, but not exclusively. A lot of the broadcasts, at least for the playoffs, when more Canadians were watching hockey than they normally would, they're national broadcasts.

So they were seeing these ads in Alberta and BC, no matter where they were, even though it was targeted in Ontario. They were focused just on Ontario because Ontario is the only province so far that has private betting companies set up. Ben will tell us what changed to allow more sports betting in Canada now and why some are concerned about the effect that it will have on people. This is The Decibel. Ben, it's great to have you here. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. This may seem like a really basic question, but what exactly are we talking about when we're talking about sports betting?

I mean, it's everything related to sports, pretty much. You can now, in the kind of digital age, you can bet on, obviously, the outcome of games and different events, like a horse race or whatever. But you can also bet on obviously the outcome of games and different events like a horse race or whatever. But you can also bet on individual little stats within a game like the halftime score or face offs or how many individual stats one player will get. That's called in-play betting. So really, it's limitless in some ways. People can be betting over and over and over during a game. Do we have a sense of how big this sports betting industry is in Canada right now?

So it's early days, but we do know due to some polling that Ipsos did a few months ago, that at least 30% of all Canadian adults are registered with a betting website. So that's not just sports betting. That would be also websites that offer casino games. 30% still seems high. Yeah, I was surprised by that number too. And it's higher in some, like in Atlanta, Canada, I think the number went up to 41%.

In Ontario, it's one third. So it differs across the country. Some of those people are betting with kind of the regulated options, the ones that their provinces are offering. Or in Ontario's case, there's like a bevy of different websites you can go with. And some are still using the gray market and going with websites hosted offshore. I mean, it's complicated because in some provinces, you have these websites that are hosted offshore in kind of the gray market. And yet the same company is regulated

in Ontario, and they're offering a pretty similar product with probably a little bit looser restrictions in the offshore sense. So basically, just so I understand, we've got, there's national regulations. The bill that came through last year basically said we can do this now across the country. Ontario specifically is allowing private betting companies in on this market then. And that's the difference. Yeah. So in the past, the only things that Canadians could bet on legally, officially, was horse racing. And they could place these things called parlay bets, where you have to basically bet on a number of different events or games. But last year, that changed. And so the

federal government passed a law that basically just took one line out of the criminal code. And it said that Canadians could bet on single events. And they didn't introduce any legislation to actually regulate it. They just said, we're going to leave this to the provinces and the territories. So this bill that was passed last year, C-218, this was at a federal level, but there's very specific rules now in Ontario. What did Ontario do differently here now? Initially, like the rest of the provinces, they kind of had their lottery corporations or crown agencies oversee sports betting. But on April 4th of this year in the spring, they introduced a live competitive market. So they just welcomed in a whole bunch of private

companies. A lot of them are American, some from the UK, like Bet365, which might be a name some people recognize. And they said, as long as you follow our rules, you can operate here and there'll be more choice for sports bettors. And a lot of people would have recognized these names because they were kind of operating in a gray market in Canada, and some still are in some provinces. They were able to use these sites, but they weren't regulated by the federal government. They weren't regulated by the federal government. They weren't regulated by provinces, and the governments also weren't able to actually collect tax dollars. And that was a major reason why they decided to pass the legislation last year.

Hmm. And why are people concerned about sports betting? And why is this being kind of talked about as an issue? Well, for years, I think there was a lot of kind of concern about gambling in general. And I think the big change that we saw and the concern that we're seeing now in Ontario and in Canada more broadly was just how much gambling has become infused with the sports watching experience. Like you cannot watch a Blue Jays game without being told the latest odds and the money line and kind of softly encouraged to bet, I would say. And I think people

are concerned about normalizing that, normalizing that for young people, but just for sport fans in general, because obviously there is a risk of addiction when it comes to all types of gambling. Yeah. So there's, I guess, the addiction risk of the gambling itself. But then what you're talking about, too, is the ads around sports betting. So seeing different players or famous people kind of promoting this stuff, especially to a wide audience that would include young people then as well. Yeah. And we have seen that. I mean, Wayne Gretzky, he's in ads for one of the big companies called BetMGM, which is owned by the famous Las Vegas casino and resort. And Connor McDavid is also in ads for that company. He's kind of, I would say, the best hockey player currently in the NHL right now. Austin Matthews

is another name that's been tied to a sports betting company. It's just kind of almost like a 180 from just a few years ago, where a lot of the leagues, NFL, NHL, they were quite concerned with the association with gambling, even when it was in the gray market, like it was before the rules changed last year. But they've totally embraced it. And so have the TV networks, obviously, because they're making their own content. They're partnering with companies as well. This is making me think, though, about, you know, there's kind of a fun side to gambling potentially there,

but there's also the darker side when we do talk about gambling addiction and the ways that it can be really detrimental for a lot of people too. Do we have a sense of how many Canadians struggle with gambling addiction? There was a recent StatsCan survey from 2018 that was released that found that 300,000 Canadians are at severe moderate risk for gambling-related problems. But that was, of course, before we legalized sports betting with single-event betting legalization last year. So it'll be interesting to see how that number

changes over time. It's still small. I mean, I talked to a lot of academics and critics even of gambling. They will note that only a minority of people who engage in the activity will become addicted. But when it becomes more normalized in society, that number will grow. We'll be right back after this message. So how are regulators in Ontario specifically, how are they planning to address this part of the issue? So I talked to the AGCO, that's the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, about this. And they emphasize that responsible gambling, which is kind of a buzz term in the industry, is their number one priority. And they do do some things that they've gotten credit for.

Like when it comes to advertising, they've limited so-called inducements. So that's kind of promotions that say, if you sign up with our website, you're going to get free bets or you'll get a bunch of free credit that you can use to bet with. They don't let those promotions appear in public ads. So on TV or on social media, you won't see that. You'll only see that kind of promotion on their actual websites or let's say direct marketing and emails if you've signed up with a certain platform. And that apparently is a very productive thing because that kind of promotion, it encourages riskier bets according to studies that have been done.

But a lot of the rules around problem gambling, which is another term you hear a lot when you look at this industry, the province said, well, we're going to set basic outcomes. We want companies to meet. We want to encourage them to have a responsible environment on their websites, but we're not going to tell them what to do in every case. So it's kind of up to them to decide whether they should intervene if they think someone is showing kind of worrisome signs like reckless betting or maybe spending too much time on the app. So it's up to the company that would make money if the person keeps betting to decide if they should stop. I mean, there are broad guidelines that they want these companies to follow. They want them to intervene if someone's displaying concerning behavior and they're

supposed to kind of act proportionally to whatever the situation is. And so that could mean potentially cutting someone off, freezing their account. But it's not really clear. They kind of have discretion to decide what to do in those cases. And so I talked to some companies that are operating in Ontario, some of the new ones that started. They didn't really give me much detail on how often they intervene when someone might be showing these worrisome signs like spending too much money on the app or almost like a pattern of more and more bets every day one company said it was definitely more than zero was the number of times they intervened it doesn't really say much yeah it's it, they said that they were kind of still, it's early. They didn't want to really share that.

One company cited privacy concerns. But the main thing that I did hear when we were talking about responsible gambling with these companies and also with the provincial regulator was kind of voluntary ways people themselves can curb their own gambling. One thing that's talked about a lot is self-exclusion. So there's kind of, there's a feature on every website offered on Ontario that allows people to block their own access to the website for different amounts of time. It could be a week, it could be longer, it could be indefinitely. I could imagine it could also be difficult too if you're trying to self-exclude, but you're still, if you're still watching sports, you're getting the ads, you're seeing all that content there. Even on social media, you're getting ads, right? So there's a lot of different places that it can

hit you from. Let's talk a little bit about, I guess, some of the different ways of thinking about what's happening in Ontario here. So some people compare the legalization of cannabis and the legalization of gaming here because there's a black market for these things. People are going to engage with them no matter what. And the argument is, well, why not regulate them? Why not get some tax money from them and regulate it in this open space here? What have the experts you've talked to said about this line of thinking in terms of sports betting? So even the harshest critics would say that it's better to have sports gambling and all types of gamblings under government regulation and be able to collect tax dollars on it. But when I spoke to even kind of hardline critics of the gambling industry in the UK,

they were saying that, yeah, it's good that the government is overseeing this, but we need to make sure that there are clear and strict safeguards in place and that the onus doesn't only fall on the individual. I'm glad you brought up the UK because I did want to ask you about the UK's experience. They've actually kind of gone down this road before Ontario. So as we're embarking on this whole thing of sports betting, what can we learn from the UK's experience there? Yeah, they have an interesting experience because they kind of have watched the contemporary gambling industry explode when it went from analog to digital. They introduced regulations,

new laws that were kind of encouraging a big gambling industry in 2007. And that was the same year that the iPhone came out. And so the laws were kind of written for the analog age, but the industry just ran with smartphone. And all of a sudden people had, as one person I spoke to, kind of seven or eight casinos just hanging out in their pocket at all times. And what that led to was a huge surge in advertising, in play betting, as we talked about before, where you can just kind of bet on random micro stats in a game that exploded. And now that's like the majority of sport bets in the UK. And along with that, eventually stories of kind of addiction and people who even took their own lives because of their problem with gambling started to surface and started to make the headlines.

Families would come out and talk about it. And more scrutiny was placed on the industry. Nowadays, the picture is very different. And advertising has been cut down quite a bit. You can't show ads during sporting events before 9 p.m. There's a debate going on about whether they should be having betting firms advertise on jerseys, which is a very common thing in the UK. In the fall, you'll no longer be able to show pro athletes in betting ads or even other celebrities that appeal to youth. A couple of years ago, they banned the use of credit cards, which I think is kind of a ubiquitous way, at least in North America, how we bet online. So there's been a lot of significant

changes and there's more to come. There's a government review that's been going on for quite a while assessing the country's laws when it comes to online gambling. Yeah. That's actually very interesting to hear the experience there and to think about potentially what we need to think about here in Canada, in Ontario specifically as we're going forward. And I guess I just want to ask you, Ben, to end off. I mean, the NFL season is starting and we're going to be seeing hockey again in a little bit. How big of a role do you think sports betting is going to play in how we interact with sports now? It's an interesting question because sports betting is kind of marketed as this interactive way of, it's almost like a closer fan experience. Like you're engaging with the sport that you're

watching. I know one executive I spoke to at a sports betting company that operates in Ontario. He said it's just fun to put a couple of dollars on a game after years of opposing it, though he did acknowledge that there's probably a financial aspect to that as well. But you'll find really, really opposing views when it comes to that. There is one academic I spoke to at Bath University in the UK who's writing a book on sports betting and how that kind of took over his country, as he put it, and he believes North America is next. He said, when gambling becomes culturally embedded and normalized as a part of fandom, I think there's a real danger that the essence of sport is lost. And then he implored Canadians to, I quote, hold the cultural values of what sport means dearly. Hold them close because

when they're gone, they're gone. Ben, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. This episode was produced by Zahra Kazema. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pigenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.