Went to the UK for a visit few years ago and the amount of gambling/betting adverts in public places in the UK was flabbergasting. The fact that every ad featured a macho dude with a buzz cut half-threateningly peddling his betting venue of choice didn't help much either. "Like an addict to addict, here's the brand I prefer" type of thing. This left a really bizarre and lasting impression for some reason.
It wasn't always like this. Until 2005 betting and gambling was heavily regulated, advertising was basically prohibited (even in bookmakers windows), and the types of gambling that could occur at betting shops and racegrounds was fairly limited.
Then the whole industry was deregulated by the 2005 Gambling Act, and some extremely predatory companies moved in to exploit the new space. The 2008 GFC resulted in a lot of high street shops suddenly becoming empty, particularly in socio-economically poorer areas, and many were converted into betting shops. I understand it used to be the case that banks and bookmakers premises had the same planning designation and so, as banks unloaded their high street premises, they could be converted to betting shops without requiring planning permission.
The present UK government doesn't seem interested in effective regulation, and the legal review they announced in 2021 appears to be stalled. Meanwhile the industry continues to create endless misery.
Is there a bit of a plague of gambling addicts? I kind of see it here in the US with sports gambling and people buying hundreds of dollars in lotto tickets. Not quite epidemic proportions but it is bad, especially with men.
It's the most dystopian wtf moment I've experienced in my life. Dramatic music, documentary-like-voice as if about how someone will murder everyone you know, and the whole point is "don't vote for this person based on the feelings I just made you feel".
Pharmaceutical ads are much more dystopian I think.
Politically influencing people through advertisements regarding who to vote for is plenty democratic and civilized. Those ads are actually very well curtailed by slander and libel laws. Any/everything said about another candidate is almost definitely true, albeit sensationalized.
I wont argue at what takes the dystopian price. However, I did not find those types of advertisements democratic or civilized. In fact, I would argue that the type of advertisement almost fits the definition of terrorism. A veiled threat of violence for political gain. Just not the straight up obvious kind of violence. Just legal, and common place in the US. Absolutely horrifying for someone visiting during a primary/general election.
And, whether or not something is covered by slander and libel laws is absolutely meaningless. You can convey the same emotional message without actually making statements, if what you want is just to scare people.
"Do you reaaally want to find out if your kids will be safe to walk home from school if X is elected for office? Imagine the phone call you receive from the police department when they ask you to identify the body. Don't wait for that phone call. Vote for Y, tough on crime...."
No statements here, no slander. Just a perversion of a democratic process.
Hmmm, I’ve never heard seen ads like that. I wouldn’t have thought your example was legal, actually. Maybe other states? If that was your experience I can see why you feel that way.
The US has a similar 'WTF' when it comes to pharmaceutical ads.
The US is heading in a similar direction with gambling, if we aren't there already. Sports betting it feels like makes up half of the advertising and sponsorships you see when you watch professional sports these days.
I'm waiting for people to realize watching sports are a negative externality.
>Environmental damage(transportation)
>Addiction
>Opportunity cost
>Celeb worship
and only partially related:
>Sports betting(and addiction to betting)
Its a hard pill to take, I habitually watch my university's football team. It is depressing since they lose and their expectations are high. Even the year they won, I can't help to think how many hours I wasted on useless feeder teams and previous seasons. There is a community aspect, but this is overblown because nearly every hobby has a community.
Nothing wrong with playing sports, but there is a reason for the phrase 'bread and circuses'.
In addition, an often overlooked aspect of watching sports is the emasculation of men and the channeling of their physical energy into something pointless and profitable, rather than towards social unrest or displeasure with the ruling class.
It also provides an artificial sense of community where people celebrate the success of something in which they have no part. It's a vicarious form of community achievement which takes effort and money from real communities, like your neighbors and the city around you.
I hadn't watched sports in my 20's thinking it a waste of time. I starting watching in my 40's when my son had an interest and it's been a fun bonding experience. And in the US corporate world, it's one of the few things (besides the weather) you can discuss with folks that won't potentially get everyone all angry and worked up.
> But also, those are plenty of things to bond over. Watching sports to bond must be one of the most shallow types of bonding.
Honestly, that's all many people are looking for in an office setting. They aren't looking to get into deep discussions about their dreams and fears, they just want to know the people they're working with are friendly and talk about something other than work for a bit.
I had a similar WTF when a local hospital (in the US) had a marketing "thank you for choosing our hospital" after I called to schedule a test. Get that BS out of the medical system.
I'm all for the legalization of cannabis/gambling/alcohol/prostitution/etc. but I do believe that advertising for these industries are a net negative for society. We're all used to alcohol advertising by now but it's objectively just as bad as the rest.
'We're all used to alcohol advertising' - I can not stand to see alcohol advertising in certain places where I know it should be trivial to block it - like ads in google news..
There are some regulations or standard applied to alcohol ads though right? And not allowed for in content / showing people drink it TV shows as well?
I am for free speech.. so I hate to say ban ads.. but I can see 'no sexy models pushing alcohol / gamblin' - perhaps they should be words only and no imagery allowed.. still want optout option for google news and similar.. nice if can be opted out at an ip level - seeing those ads on chromecast and other devices, meh!
I think most advertising is a net negative for society. I'm all for legalizing the things you mentioned, but every one of them needs to be heavily regulated and a part of that should mean limits on ads along with where/when those products can be bought and enjoyed.
I'm interested in this line "Many media outlets are increasingly reliant on money from betting companies" as I'd be interested to know how reliant the Guardian was on this revenue. Is stopping this type of advertising a big impact on their top line?
I applaud the move either way, but stopping doing something that's 0.1% of your revenue vs something that is 25% are two very different things.
I doubt Guardian is as reliant as say Sky is. Betting is pretty much the primary driver of revenue for their sports coverage, and indeed football as a whole. It seems half of premier teams have some form of betting company on their shirt -- often aimed at those in the far east
Judging people and companies on motivations rather than actions is kind of a losing game. You can never really know for sure, and it’s easy to speculate in every direction.
It seems inevitable since even when actions are the same, intent really does matter. An adult inviting a child into their home is an action that happens every day, but intent is pretty important.
We should speculate in every direction while considering the motivations of a person or company, and we should weigh the likelihood and potential costs of being right or wrong about our suspicions when choosing how to react to events. Blinding ourselves to motivations (actual or possible) is a losing game which will only make us easier to manipulate.
> We should speculate in every direction while considering the motivations of a person or company, and we should weigh the likelihood and potential costs of being right or wrong about our suspicions when choosing how to react to events. Blinding ourselves to motivations (actual or possible) is a losing game which will only make us easier to manipulate.
Totally disagree, especially for companies. Companies are usually thousands of people. Any action was probably hotly debated, and some agreed and some opposed. It's just silly to treat a company like an individual person who has good motivations and bad motivations.
You do you, but I don't think making up motivations and then acting like they're true makes anyone less easy to manipulate.
If you run a successful blog or similar, you will start getting offers from gambling companies wanting to purchase advertising and articles. These are legitimate offers and they pay well - even if your content is very local or narrow, such as citizen journalism. Gambling is an extremely profitable business, and they want as many customers as possible. Expect their advertising to only grow.
They won't tell you, or give an exact figure, other than this nonsense:
> Guardian Media Group increasingly relies on contributions directly from readers, rather than advertising, for its income.
Which is no wonder they 'seem' to be continuously begging their readers to pay. Now after this, I should expect them to be begging even more aggressively, unless someone is funding them grants or what not, since they are still not telling us something or giving an exact figure.
Either way, one-sided publications like the Guardian is hardly worth paying for regardless.
The Australian operation of the Guardian has said recently that donations from readers are now more than 50% of the revenue. And they’re trying to increase that percentage further. Not sure about their UK or US operations.
That is quite phenomenal really - I don't think any other widely-used service (other than actual charities) operates on that basis. Though I don't really see my monthly payment (a whole $10, mind you) as a donation. But their spiel that convinces readers to do so is well-written, and hooked me in. Well that, and just a look at how bad the quality of most other online news sources was, seemingly particularly the ones operated by profitable companies.
I was watching the NBA playoffs and I found that the numbers of ads from betting apps was higher than any other category. I don't think this is a healthy trend. Also unlike last year, this year we did not see any crypto ads.. so that's a good thing.
They recently legalized sports betting in MA. My SO lives in the North End and even I didn’t realize until I noticed Boston go from normal ads to sports betting ads being everywhere in the city.
I work on advertising and draw a hard line for myself: no promoting gambling or mobile apps that are mostly gambling. I think it should be legal to gamble but illegal to advertise it.
Yup, with you. I've run my own wee concern for about 14 years and the only Gambling-related job I took on was helping a fairly desperate friend out with a very small something that utimately didn't come to pass, for promoting 'PaddyPower'.
It kind of amuses me thinking of all the contracts I might consider whereas jobs for Gambling companies are an immediate 'Nope'.
I was(and might still be) a libertarian that believes in legalization of everything... But you get older and you see the effects of drugs, gambling, etc...
Humans have almost no control over the reptilian part of the brain, this is the part that keeps people coming back to drugs and gambling. (There is a book Power of Habit, my number 1 book ever, that talks about how that reptile brain works, I'd pay $100k for that book)
If humans have no control over something, maybe there is a case for big brother stepping in. But not if having a black market actually improves the condition.
Here in California, the state government itself advertises gambling, promoting the California Lottery. I find this extra frustrating - my tax dollars are being spent to encourage dumb behavior by other citizens.
It’s not your tax dollars at work, it’s the opposite. The CA lottery generates about $2B, 1% of total funds that go to public schools.
It encourages dumb behavior but brings in money for the state. Is it a net win or net loss… depends on how much the negative externality is valued—is lotto a gateway to more gambling or a substitute for other, costlier gambling?
There are plenty of people who argue that lotteries should be banned, which is fine, but that will result in fewer services or higher taxes.
The way I see it, California extracts plenty of money from its citizens via taxes. When they decide to extract this money via a lottery instead, all the overhead of the lottery is just a complete waste. That includes advertising the lottery and implementing the lottery.
I guarantee your lottery makes many times over what it costs to advertise, so not a dime of your tax dollars goes into it. If you're buying lottery tickets then yeah a portion of that goes into it. think, Mark, think.
man it's crazy to me that some people have so little self control, that the only caring option is the nuclear one, to simply never risk exposing ANYONE to the thing that these people are addicted to or compulsive about.
Like I can see a gambling ad without wanting to gamble, but other people have it SO BAD that the Guardian is avoiding showing me gambling ads, just to be on the safe side. it's shocking.
UK bookies are evil. It’s rather easy to win money from them, but they are extremely good at spotting smart money and will immediately limit your account.
If you have a long term account with a bookie, you are a loser. (in monetary terms. :))
I think it’s called having the courage of your convictions. Sitting on a high horse is far more laudable when you make the sacrifices you demand of others.
In the eternal words of The Chemical brothers, I don't believe "in a heaven and hell, world in opposite's kind of reality".
I get you're going for a "gotcha" kind of response, but the truth is that for the most part, trying to reach for some improvement in society, even when not reaching for a platonic ideal of moral purity, is a good thing.
No, I guess neither me nor the guardian have reached for a complete carbon zero footprint regarding fuel consumption. Yet. Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe it does, but unless we try, we'll never know.
Seems like that the Guardian doesn't want to admit that they enjoyed fossil fuels too and instead are looking for some scapegoat to blame. It's not like fossil fuel was pumped out of the ground for no reason. It actually made people's lives better.
I understand gambling and cigarette advert bans, but how does a fossil fuel advertising ban help in this case exactly? It's not like we can stop using fossil fuels completely right now. So it seems like hypocritical virtue signalling.
We can’t completely stop people from smoking either. But we can prevent people from starting and we can perhaps prevent those who have already started from increasing their consumption. Slowing down the rate of use by banning advertisements isn’t “hypocritical virtue signaling” it’s a real, measurable improvement. Perfection is the enemy of progress.
Seems to me if it doesn't help, then the ads weren't doing anything anyway, so they're doing fossil fuel companies a favor by saving them money that they were wasting.
The ads might influence which fossil fuel supplier people will pick, but in the end they have to pick someone, because we can't even get food without burning fossil fuels somewhere.
Not all ads are sales ads. This is especially true for huge industries with a few major players and strong industry associations & lobbying groups. Double-especially true for such industries that also have a serious negative-externality problem and are facing significant regulatory risk.
A quick image search for "[name of fossil fuel company] ad"—plus, just having seen lots of these ads over the years, in the wild—suggests that much of that spending is about PR and influencing policy opinions of voters, not trying to sell me some particular product.
As you keep writing, the fuel that's needed will be purchased anyway, so the main effect of this would be reducing the reach of corporate PR (i.e. bullshit) campaigns. Seems like a cheap and easy win to me, and a service to their readers.
Its right wing broadsheet counterpart -- the telegraph - just filed for bankruptcy. So I don't think there's any counterfactual to support your 'arugment'.
TBF while I think the Telegraph is flying into extremely bad headwinds by chasing a literally dying audience, it's bankruptcy is due to the ongoing feud between the family that owns it and them trying to starve each other of funds by pulling cash out of the parent company rather than the business of that newspaper itself.
Mexico started putting ads on cigarettes on how it causes death. Graphic images as well. Then they started adding labels to food, "excess sodium / sugar", etc. Then they banned mascots on food products. No more Toucan Sam or Tony the Tiger. Though the last thing seemed a bit excessive, the cereal does look more generic and I know that as a kid, I asked for name brand cereal. I hope they target fast food ads next depicting great looking food that in reality usually look as if it was stepped on.
>No more Toucan Sam or Tony the Tiger. Though the last thing seemed a bit excessive, the cereal does look more generic and I know that as a kid, I asked for name brand cereal.
Nah advertising to kids is a bunch of bullshit. It should not be allowed in general and definitely not for things that are harmful to them.
Advertising at its core is one adult telling adult about something. There's utility there and it seems like a pretty fundamental right. Though I agree that it's warped into a bit of a monster and should be dialed in a bit.
Surely you can argue it is a fundamental right to have communication between consenting adults. But often in the case of advertising, the receiving party does not really have a choice. I would sooner argue that it should be a fundamental right to not be on the receiving end of communications you don't want, than that it should be a fundamental right to advertise to people who do not want to be advertised to.
This is my key argument on why billboards and similar advertising that can’t be avoided if you’re in public shouldn’t be allowed. There’s been no consent obtained.
I was in Cancun, MX recently and bought a box of Oreos at the resort shop. There were stickers on it with multiple warnings. I was quite surprised, but pleased to see the government making an effort to reduce consumption.
That's true but it would be extremely expensive if not impossible to implement therapy for all the addictive people in the world (most people, including me). So we just have to accept addiction and then try not to deliberately encourage the more damaging addictions. So addiction to coffee is not great but it doesn't do that much damage. Addiction to cigarettes does much more damage so while we don't probit it we don't allow people to deliberately encourage it via advertising.
Addiction to coffee? Are there a lot of people for whom coffee is harmful yet they keep on drinking it? The only people I know who say coffee is bad for them don't drink it.
Obese people, on the other hand, continue to eat despite knowing it makes them fat and unhealthy. It's an addiction just like cigarettes and should be treated the same.
If you chug down 3 lites of vegetable oil, and it somehow all ends up in your lipid stores rather than giving you an unpleasant visit to the ceramic throne, you gain at most 2.8 kg.
This may indeed take months to shift, but it's not even close to the maximum possible damage to someone's finances from gambling.
Your number is exactly correct (1.4kg/day) [1] but you can easily do it without oil as they did in the study (there are a lot of waking hours in the day and a lot of good fatty foods.) Alcohol (and some medication) of course makes both storage and consumption easier.
3 lites of oil is approximately 10 times the recommended calorific input for adult men; it certainly isn't "easy", on the basis of what I've heard from a now-long-deceased acquaintance with cystic fibrosis who was required to consume 10,000 kcal/day just to overcome the medical condition; and 10,000 kcal/day is less than half the amount here (24,436 kcal), which I chose on the basis of it being a lot of fluid to drink in one day even if it was water.
> Everyone who's ever had a feast knows you can gain enough weight in a weekend it'll take months if not years to diet off.
Is this actually a thing? I've definitely massively overeaten for short periods before (e.g. Christmas dinner). But the effect on weight was very transient.
I've lost about 65 lbs, then gained about half of that back. If I overeat in a single day, I can put on a pound or 2. If I don't compensate the next day for that excess, some of that weight will stay on. If I don't compensate within a couple days, all of that weight will stay.
I've had this struggle for a few years, gaining about 30 lbs over the course of a few years.
What the GP said might not apply to everyone, but it does apply to those who have eaten to excess in the past and are now struggling to keep that excess weight off again.
Yes i highly doubt the validity of his statement. My calorie intake is around 2500 a day to maintain a weight of around 70kg (with some excerise). If i wanted to gain 2kg of weight id have to consume around 10000 excess calories over a period of two weeks.
I have also many times lost 2kg over a period of a few weeks by simply being lazy to calculate my calorie intake while excersising more than usual. Gaining weight takes ridiculously more effort for me than losing weight.
> If i wanted to gain 2kg of weight id have to consume around 10000 excess calories over a period of two weeks.
Which is of course trivial to do. That's one kebab extra per day.
You just don't eat caloricilly dense food at a high frequency and grossly underestimate how many calories someone can eat in a day [1]. Also, for most people losing 1kg a week is considered very fast weight loss at the border of what's recommended for safe caloric restriction.
There is no way that a normal person can gain 1.4kg of body mass in a day unless they are on some sort of eating challenge. Even then I doubt that they would metabolise even half of the food unless they built up to it.
That's a 10,000+ calorie surplus, you'd have to eat 1.5kg of straight mayonnaise and digest it all.
Sure, you can get the scale to shift by that much, I can do that in a few minutes by drinking 1.4L of water.
If you want to learn about actual realistic bodyweight tuning, look into the bodybuilding community, or any sport that has weight classes. Much more accurate information than using indirect measures of what people sort of felt like they sort of wanted to eat.
except people need food to survive? you don't need gambling. thats why its fine to ban. you're jsut engaging in a very bad faith argument since they aren't even close to equivalent.
This is like when people say that consuming meat is a problem for climate change, completely ignoring the utility of meat.
Obesity is a problem, but at least food, even fast food, even junk food, has some utility, whereas gambling has none at all.
I don’t think people who say meat is a problem for climate change are ignoring the utility of meat. They’re just pointing out that meat is a problem for climate change. Which it is, regardless of utility.
From their own website, a case study in their partnership with Ocado [0]. In summary "For a whole year, Ocado own all ad inventory in Feast [the Grauniads online food magazine] – both print and online"
Weird that they should call it a “ban”, as though there’s a legal aspect to it, or as if it applies to entities beyond the company’s direct control. Aren’t they just stopping it?
Not sure if it’s related to the fact thay they’re excluding state-sponsored gambling from the “ban”.
