The Guardian – Ofcom research finds 1.39m gambling ads ran in UK last year, compared with 234,000 in 2007 when sector was deregulated.
The number of gambling commercials on British TV has rocketed from 234,000 a year to nearly 1.4m annually since the deregulation of the sector six years ago, according to new research.
Media regulator Ofcom on Tuesday published research showing that viewers were bombarded with 1.39m gambling ads ran last year, with under-16s exposed to an average of 211 ads each.
This is an increase of nearly 600% since the Gambling Act 2005 came into force in September 2007, which opened the door to TV advertising for sports betting, online casinos and poker. Prior to that legislation only allowed ads for football pools, the National Lottery and bingo premises.
In 2007, some 234,000 gambling ads were aired – two years before that the figure was just 90,000. This rose to 537,000 in 2008 after the market was liberalised.
Ofcom pointed out that between 2005 and 2012, a period that has seen significant growth in the number of digital TV channels available to viewers, the total amount of TV advertising airtime also doubled from 17.4m to 34.2m spots.
Over this period the proportion of commercials accounted for by gambling ads rose from 0.5% to 4.1% of all TV advertising.
