Sports betting ads drop in 2023, AGA and Nielsen find out

A new study commissioned by the American Gaming Association and carried out by Nielsen, a global media research and marketing agency, has revealed that the total advertising spend on sports betting including daily fantasy sports declined to $210m in 2023 compared to a year before in 2022, or a 15% drop.

Excluding daily fantasy sports, the overall decrease in sports betting ad spending was 21% in 2023 compared to a year earlier. The decline in budgets also impacted the volume of sports betting ads which were down 4% year-over-year across all channels used. The volume of ads further contracted by 20% from 2021, when a peak was reached.

Regulated gambling advertisement has a significant role to play in the United States’ burgeoning online betting and sports betting market in general. The American Gaming Association has long held gambling advertisement to be the way forward for the industry, as it allows to educate consumers about what the regulated gambling options are.

The association maintains that a fairly large number of people still do not know if they are playing at a regulated or unregulated gambling site, although the trend has been shifting clearly towards the licensed gambling market in the United States. A decrease in the total spend on gambling advertisements could throw a wrench in the works, however.

Advertisement by licensed sportsbooks is said to have favorably increased awareness for the regulated market, as betting companies are still vying for market share with offshore operators. In the meantime, the study also sought to shed clarity on what the main advertisement channels were, with television still dominating as the medium of choice for advertisers and sports gambling companies.

Yet, the contraction in advertising volumes on TV has been significant with TV accounting for 33% of all gambling ads posted in 2021 to only shrink down to 11% in 2023. To put things in further perspective, 70% of respondents who participated in a previous American Gaming Association research said that they were unaware that they had been playing at an offshore sportsbook instead of the regulated market options in the United States.

This finding stresses the importance of regulated gambling ads. Yet, this cooling down is not unexpected. For one, there has been some regulatory pushback. In places such as New York, the tax rate has been too high to allow companies to be aggressive with their marketing budgets.

Another matter has to do with a bill that wants to ban sports betting advertising, also coming out of the Empire State, with New York Congressman Paul Tonko voicing a hawkish position on gambling ads in his draft law.

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