Gambling industry’s bright PR obscures dark truth of addiction

Las Vegas must be a fundamentalist nightmare, precisely because Sin City is unashamedly fundamental too. It is gambling’s physical apotheosis, nakedly doing whatever it takes to separate punters from their money. However, even Vegas can’t compete with its virtual equivalent; on the phone, at home, 24 hours a day, and no need to fly to the desert – industrial-sized greed at a simple swipe of a finger.

Vegas at least is upfront. Pumping all the oxygen into the casinos to keep everybody awake, gargantuan buffets to stop you straying outside, drinks practically delivered intravenously, every kind of indulgence catered for if you have the price of it; the market at its most blatant, everything a mile wide and an inch deep; just give us your money.

Everyone should go once just to see. Whether you want to go back again is quite a revelatory thing. Yours truly hasn’t been back; not out of superiority, rather a suspicion it might be tough for someone with a gambling impulse to leave again. But it’s a long way, and the flights are a drag, and there are only so many beaming have-a-nice-days anyone can take without wanting to fling sharp objects.

Travel automatically places a remove. Much of the insidiousness of online gambling, and its promotion, derives from just such a lack. A couple of generations now live with the reality that their phone is a third arm, indispensable to their everyday life. And just as something barely exists if it’s not on their phone, so a pervasive digital presence can make something seem as normal as breathing.

Coated in images

An incessant blizzard of gambling advertising has become normalised. It’s barely possible to open any page without being invited to an assortment of free bets. They come coated in images of James Bond-type figures flinging money at roulette tables, pneumatic babes pawing at their tux, promising a world of plastic excitement helpfully numbed to everyday realities such as having to hand over actual readies that might mean something.

Any sporting event, no matter how mundane, comes replete with innumerable betting markets revolving around every statistical and score-line kink imaginable. When it comes to World Cup finals or similar major tournaments, the industry involved in catering to the human gambling urge is vast, worth billions, and all of it sold on the basis of it being just a bit of fun, a test of judgment, a normal embellishment of the big-game experience.

And thankfully for most, it is just that, an enjoyable exercise in sating an impulse so primal it comes from the cave. The relentless hard-sell can be as exhausting as it is infuriating but that’s the Vegas business model – in return for shiny bells and whistles, we cough up. The consequence of that incessant hard-sell on those whose impulse becomes compulsive can be desperate, however.

Sad bloke

Last week’s Department of Social Protection-commissioned UCD research into gambling in this country provides some stark evidence that the old

Andy Capp

cliché of the sad bloke down the bookies office is old hat. They’re guys – and it is mostly guys – in their late 50s up.

Instead it is kids as young as nine who are using smartphones to gamble, with anyone under 50 much more likely to bet online rather than traipse to Ladbrokes. The study declared up to 40,000 people in Ireland can be described as addicted to gambling.

There’s an obvious chicken and egg question here about which comes first, the product or the compulsion to use it. And there’s no point sidestepping the persistent suspicion that compulsive personalities will find some poison somewhere, no matter what it is. But neither can government or the gambling industry sidestep the consequence of a remunerative business which, no matter how many supposedly frivolous bells and whistles are attached, coldly exists to service the bottom-line.

Schoolyard challenge

What studies really indicate is how normalised the business of extracting money from gamblers has become to the digital generation, a modern manifestation of the old schoolyard challenge – “wanna bet?” And we do want to bet. But is it good for anyone that the online hard-sell is so blatant: all Bellagio fountains but without cool spray to refresh the memory as to how rare is the bookie who doesn’t ultimately come out ahead.

Advertising restrictions invite accusations of merely hiding a problem, rather than solving it. They usually also come accompanied by assertions of harmlessness and devotion to people’s right to choice. Except advertising is not harmless; if it didn’t work in altering people’s behaviour, it wouldn’t be a colossal industry itself. And the right to choose pitch is a cop-out. The world is full of people disposed to making lousy choices. Are they to be dismissed as mere detritus, lost in the corporate current?

We’ve been down this road before with alcohol and the arguments are pretty much interchangeable, certainly in relation to sports sponsorship. Like the booze lobby, the gambling industry hides behind a lot of PR cant, and since it’s such a profitable exercise it may be naive to suggest they should rein back on the hard-sell. However, it could actually be in their long-term interest.

Not for aesthetic reasons obviously, nor even because they care about their customers. But because just like alcohol, any reasonable society can’t stand back and let its vulnerable become mere marks. Government ultimately has to intervene because addiction is a devastating issue for so many, and right on its own doorstep too. What happens online doesn’t always stay online.

So is it too simplistic to argue it is in the gambling industry’s self-interest to take the initiative here and self-regulate the hard-sell so it isn’t quite so fundamental? Probably: long-shots are long-shots for a reason.