The UK’s four biggest betting operators – William Hill, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power and Gala Coral have set up an independent gambling standards commissioner to monitor industry advertising practices.
The independent initiative has been set up in order to co-operate with UK advertising standards authorities and government regulators, in order to bring clarity to gambling advertising practices and to avoid any future clampdowns on sector advertising and marketing.
The four operators will abide to new advertising measures which will include the scrapping of aggressive “Sign Up”, Deposit Bonus, and Free Money offers on television before the UK 21:00 watershed.
Further measures will see all advertising of fixed odds betting terminals (FOBT’s) to be removed from the operator’s retail betting shops. The quartet of betting operators have further promised that all advertising messaging on any mediums will now feature responsible gambling messages.
The newly created gambling standards commissioner aims to be up and running by January 2015. The participating operators have stated that the agency will act completely independently, and will have the power to impose fines on operators who breach new advertising practices.
The founding quartet hopes that more UK betting operators will join the initiative in the coming months. Senior management within the four founding operators believes that the independent initiative is needed to bridge communications and regulatory agenda between the sector and parliament
Richard Glynn, the chief executive of Ladbrokes, said the measures, which will be laid out in full in an open letter today, represent a “material step and offer by the industry to effectively hand over monitoring of what we are doing”.