Gambling commercials and the NHL

[calumniate]

Originally Posted by Freddy

What happens when a significant chunk of your male audience 18-50 yrs old become gambling addicts and then seek therapy? How significant of a drop off is the audience 5 years after ads are allowed? Does this pose challenges when Dads that were former sports gambling addicts stop watching sports and choose not to enrol their sons & daughters in those sports?
I’m just a lay person, but I wonder how shortsighted this strategy of allying leagues with bookies is in the long run?

Great point. This is one of the areas where the government can be effective. Look at the net benefits and long term public health impacts of changing their policies. Do some dumb calculus and whatnot, and ban these ads already.

[Bandwagon Surfer]

Originally Posted by Freddy

What happens when a significant chunk of your male audience 18-50 yrs old become gambling addicts and then seek therapy? How significant of a drop off is the audience 5 years after ads are allowed? Does this pose challenges when Dads that were former sports gambling addicts stop watching sports and choose not to enrol their sons & daughters in those sports?
I’m just a lay person, but I wonder how shortsighted this strategy of allying leagues with bookies is in the long run?

You do not need to be a former sports gambling addict, all you need to do is pay attention to your children.

Children's brains are still developing, they just do not have the same capabilities as adult brains do. Your ability to judge risk is one of the last things to develop, usually taking until ~25 years old to mature. This is why teenagers take such stupid risks, and why they make such good frontline soldiers.

As a parent, you do need to teach your children about gambling, prepare them to be a functioning adult by understanding the math and phycology behind it. But it is completely irresponsible to expose them to gambling itself, their brain development means that they will be taken advantage of.

Brain development is why, historically we as a society age restricted gambling. Too many children were being taken advantage of. But people have short memories, and exploiting children is so profitable, so politicians have sold us out and deregulated gambling.

The biggest issue right now is video games, real money in game "coins" + loot boxes are casinos designed to exploit children.

Sports are not as bad, as long as you are playing them. Watching sports is such a gambling ad barrage that it is no longer possible to watch them with your children. So my kids are not watching any professional sports now, but are still playing sports.

How this will play out long term is anyone's guess. All I know is there are definitely some children who will have no childhood memories of professional sports because of the gambling ads.

[dustygoon]

Trying to think in terms of societal benefits of things that get advertised that really should be controlled. Pharmaceuticals are tightly controlled even though they should have societal benefit but with risk.

The vices are obvious. No benefit to smoking and ads are highly regulated. Alcohol...regulated, but not near as much (norms plus could be some benefit of a glass of wine maybe?).

But gambling to me clearly has negative societal benefit. A zero-sum game less a bookie fee. If you didn't have gambling, then a guy over here would have more money while another over there would have less and a bookie would lose a job.

It's equivalent to allowing ads for expressly offering day-trading (vs investing).

I think gambling ads should be massively regulated.

[Pellanor]

Originally Posted by Bandwagon Surfer

The biggest issue right now is video games, real money in game "coins" + loot boxes are casinos designed to exploit children.

Children do not have nearly enough spending money to be targeted by video games. These techniques are just as effective on adults, and many are designed to catch whales, players who dumps thousands of dollars into them. One of the largest target demographics for exploitative monetization in games is actually stay at home moms, who tend to have a bit more spending money (since their family doesn't need them working a 2nd job), but limited play time (busy with children) so end up spending more on progression in their short windows of distraction. Exploiting children is just a side effect.

There are still a lot of games out there that do not have exploitative monetization strategies, but like many things it's up to the parents (and players) to research which those are.

[N-E-B]

Originally Posted by Pellanor

Children do not have nearly enough spending money to be targeted by video games. These techniques are just as effective on adults, and many are designed to catch whales, players who dumps thousands of dollars into them. One of the largest target demographics for exploitative monetization in games is actually stay at home moms, who tend to have a bit more spending money (since their family doesn't need them working a 2nd job), but limited play time (busy with children) so end up spending more on progression in their short windows of distraction. Exploiting children is just a side effect.

There are still a lot of games out there that do not have exploitative monetization strategies, but like many things it's up to the parents (and players) to research which those are.

I agree with almost everything you're saying but I think you're dead wrong with your first sentence. It's not about getting kids money now, it's about normalizing this type of behaviour so that in the future they get the kids money.

It's the exact thing the gambling companies are doing with their ads and in-game segments. It's despicable. Why does Ron MacLean have to cut to Cabbie to tell us the betting odds during intermission? Kids watch that, think it's normal, and when they're adults start gambling.

Kids are impressionable and 100% the target.

[Zarley]

Nothing wrong with gambling as long as it's in moderation!

[PuckSlap]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

They don't. This is the gambling version of the 1990s dotcom bubble. In search engines alone, Yahoo, AltaVista, AskJeeves, and several other companies were frantically burning through venture capital to try to buy market share. Each company had a perfectly sound plan to make a profit eventually, as long as they captured close to 100% of the search-engine market. Then Google came along and they all went broke, or else skedaddled into other lines of business.

Most of these sports books will be gone in a few years. The survivors won't need saturation advertising to maintain their business.

Reminds me of the huge poker craze of the mid 2000,s

Sent from my Pixel 7 Pro using Tapatalk

[Cycling76er]

Originally Posted by Zarley

Nothing wrong with gambling as long as it's in moderation!

You know, I said the same thing about cocaine but everyone still makes me out to be a monster.

[tkflames]

Will hockey become the card flip at the blackjack table between the bets?

[Goriders]

Originally Posted by Zarley

Nothing wrong with gambling as long as it's in moderation!

Wanna bet?

[Northendzone]

Originally Posted by Zarley

Nothing wrong with gambling as long as it's in moderation!

To some extent I agree with this; however, I think the issue is now how easy it is to place a bet. Just pick up your phone, set up an account and bam you are rich…..

[Mightyfire89]

I hate the gambling ads and believe they should be banned. I acknowledge that that they are a potential catastrophic influence on children and therefore parents need to do all they can to educate their children about the issue. However, any attempt to portray gambling ads as something that is a bad influence on so called adults doesn’t land with me. Just like drug abuse etc, that falls under personal responsibility as far as I’m concerned.

[pokerNhockey]

Originally Posted by Freddy

What happens when a significant chunk of your male audience 18-50 yrs old become gambling addicts and then seek therapy? How significant of a drop off is the audience 5 years after ads are allowed? Does this pose challenges when Dads that were former sports gambling addicts stop watching sports and choose not to enrol their sons & daughters in those sports?
I’m just a lay person, but I wonder how shortsighted this strategy of allying leagues with bookies is in the long run?

I think the more immediate concern is the loss of faith in the fairness of the results. I know my interest went down significantly after how the refing changed after Widemen hit the official. From NHL fan to Flames fan in terms of the games I watch.



I no longer have confidence the game is called fairly, so its harder for me to be invested outside of "my" team. Especially after you add in other things like that ref who got caught on a hot mic saying he was looking to call an early penalty on a specific team.



It's also why I will never bet on the league.


It's a real possibility that someone in hockey gets caught throwing a game in a gambling scandal. What will that do to overall interest for a league where game management is an open secret and the rules change throughout the game?

[expatflame]

I may be the minority here but I would also put alcohol ads in the same category. If we are worried about the impact on kids, I would argue that alcohol has a far more damaging effect on society than gambling. It is where do you draw the line. Alcohol and it’s social acceptance is where smoking was in the 80s.