The American Gaming Association conducted a study recently that looked into sports betting ad spending in 2023. While AGA commissioned the study, it was carried out by Nielsen who used Ad Intel.

Ad Intel is a tool that monitors advertising and tracks detailed ad spending across different channels. The channels it covers include TV, print, digital, out-of-home and cinema.

While the main focus of the study was sports betting, it also took insights from other similar industries including pharma, telecom, alcohol and fast food.

Background of the study

The legalisation of sports betting in the US has brought significantly increased ad spending to create awareness and also capture market share. Since legalisation has increased in 38 States, betting giants including BetMGM, FanDuel and DraftKings have changed their focus from local advertising campaigns to national campaigns.

Since the market has matured and is more aware, ad spend has reduced.

“Advertising by legal sportsbooks plays an important role in informing consumers about legitimate betting operators and in migrating those consumers to safe betting options,” said the AGA. “As sports betting has expanded into new states, legal operators often launch advertising campaigns to raise awareness of legal sportsbooks and capture market share. Over time, those markets mature and the level of advertising declines.”

The increased awareness and legalisation have not only worked in the favour of legitimate and licenced sports betting bookmakers. It has also worked in favour of offshore sportsbooks that aggressively advertise to players with deceptive claims misleading consumers about their legality.

The deceptive marketing by offshore sports betting operators has been so successful that 70% of players have no idea whether they are playing with offshore sportsbooks rather than sportsbooks regulated by the US market.

Impact on Ad Spend

In 2023, sports betting spending on advertising which included daily fantasy sports dropped by 15%.Rge drop represents a drop of 210 million in 2023 from 2022. When daily fantasy sports are excluded, the drop increases to 21%.

Impact on channels

Across all channels, the volume of sports betting ads was reduced by 4% from 2022 and 30% from 2021. The main advertisement channel studied was TV.

TV saw an 11% drop in 2023 and has dropped 33% since 2021. The share of TV ad spend has also reduced accordingly with a 0.4% drop from 2023, 0.5% in 2022 and 0.7% in 2021.

The drops in TV advertisement spending for other industries were 0.5% for alcohol, 1.5% for telecom, 3.8% for fast food and pharmaceuticals 14.1%. To put this in perspective, in 2023, for every single advertisement for sports betting, there were 3 telecom advertisements, 8 fast food advertisements and 31 for pharmaceuticals.