TRCM STANDING COMMITTEE BILL S-269,

AN ACT RESPECTING A NATIONAL FRAMEWORK ON ADVERTISING FOR SPORTS BETTING Opening Statement by Dr Raffaello Rossi, University of Bristol 5th June Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to talk about my research. My name is Dr Raffaello Rossi, and I'm a Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bristol. I have spent the past six years researching gambling marketing, with a major focus on its effect on children, and the question of regulations.

In my opening statement, I am going to give some insight on how gambling advertising has exploded in the UK, how it disproportionately affects children, and how other jurisdictions reacted. High Volume of Gambling Marketing In the UK, t he gambling market and its marketing have been vastly deregulated since 2007. Now, 17 years later, consumers are bombarded with gambling ads on TV, radio, social media, public transport, and whilst watching sports. Our recent study focused on the prevalence of gambling marketing during the opening weekend of the Premier League.

A staggering total of 11,000 gambling messages via live broadcasts, sports news and social media were identified during a single weekend. The most prolific s ingle match included almost 3,000 gambling messages, which equalled to an average of messages per minute. In a different study in 2021, we focused on Twitter and found around 1m ads posted from UK Twitter accounts within a single year. Half of 11–17-year-olds reported seeing gambling ads weekly on their social media.

Gambling Marketing Bans In response to excessive gambling marketing and increasing gambling problem prevalence, various European countries have recently almost entirely banned gambling marketing, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland and, as of last week, Ukraine.

Worryingly, the same multi-national companies (such as Bet365, Betwa y, LeoVegas, 888, or FanDuel) that contributed to the introduction of these bans in these countries, are now moving into new jurisdictions that have more recently opened up, such as Canada or the US, initiating a potentially similar cycle consisting of high volume and aggressive marketing, leading to normalisation, participation, and eventually, to higher gambling problem rates. Earlier this year, we replicated our study on the prevalence of gambling advertising in Canada, in collaboration with CBC News.

What we saw really reminded us of what we have observed in the UK. We looked at the live broadcasts of NHL and NBA games and found a total of 3,537 gambling messages. Around 20% of the entire duration of the live covera ge contained some form of gambling advertising. This is highly problematic as it normalises gambling as a part of sports consumption, but may also have detrimental effects on people with gambling problems or, indeed, children, who make up around 10% of the viewership.

The Effect of Gambling Ads on Children This brings me to my second point – highlighting my worries with online and social media gambling ads and their effect on youth. In our study focusing on Ontario, we already found various similarities in terms of volume and content of social media ads comp ared to the UK. Over 5 days, we recorded social media ads by nine betting accounts, viewed over 5.6m times – most likely predominantly by young people.

This is worrying, since in we conducted an online experiment with over participants aged 11-78 and found that gambling ads are strongly appealing to children and young people (11-24) but not to adults. Indeed, for every category we looked at (including sports betting, online casinos, and different forms of advertising), we found the same pattern: gambling ads trigger significantly more positive emotions in children and young persons than in adults. One reason might be that children don't yet have the necessary knowledge of how harmful gambling can be.

The issue is amplified by sneaky advertising techniques deployed by the industry, especially "content marketing". Content marketing avoids any reference to the brand, product or service being advertised, and simply aims to trigger positive emotions and to be shared widely by users. This could be memes, competitions, or ba nter. While they seem funny, innocent, and harmless, they are still nonetheless advertising a highly addictive product. Our research also found that children and young persons are not able to identify content marketing as advertising – leaving them vastly unprotected.

This is especially concerning, as around 50% of all social media ads were found to be content marketing both in the UK and Ontario. Conclusion In conclusion, we have seen the gambling industry's aggressive marketing tactics are not unique to the UK or Canada – they are part of a global issue . I hope the committee will take into consideration the long- term consequences of allowing this aggressive mar keting to continue and to take decisive steps to regulate the gambling industry's advertising practices effectively.