Connect with sports fans: an exploration of gambling operators’ strategies for using sport to build brand community through broadcast and social media on the island of Ireland

There is a growing multidisciplinary literature on gambling marketing, examining gambling adverts during televised sporting events (Newall et al., 2022; Purves et al., 2020) and gambling operators’ use of social media to promote their services (Gainsbury et al., 2016; James and Bradley, 2021; Lindeman et al., 2023). This paper contributes to the literature by presenting findings from a mixed-methods project that examines the exposure, perceptions, and attitudes of young people to gambling marketing through and around live sport on the island of Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland). Adopting a mixed-methods approach allows understanding the saturation of marketing messages and the tactics deployed by gambling operators across broadcast and social media.

First, we conducted 9 focus groups with 70 young people across 3 age groups (14-15, 16-17, 18-24) from the border regions on the island of Ireland between February and July 2023. The focus group findings gave insights into the participants’ sports media consumption and their understanding of gambling marketing and its relation to sports. Informed by our focus group findings, we identified live sporting events of interest to our young people and the broadcast and social media platforms that they used to access this content. We recorded and analysed selected live television broadcasts (football, rugby, darts, horse racing, and athletics), including pre-and post-match discussions and advertising breaks across a number of national and regional public service, commercial and subscription television channels between December 2023 and early January 2024. Finally, we collected and analysed a purposeful sample of posts (N: 178) (image and video posts including their captions, hashtags, and emojis) from 7 major gambling brands’ Instagram accounts accessible on the island of Ireland between October 2023 and early January 2024.

The findings, from our mixed-methods research, are the first within this region to show that gambling operators utilise live sports media consumption as a vehicle for marketing and brand building. Exposure to gambling marketing varies greatly between sports (football, darts and horseracing are saturated by gambling marketing), between male and female sports, and between public service and subscription TV. Furthermore, gambling operators use social media not only to promote their services via platform-based advertising but also to build their brand image by connecting with customers through the distribution of native social media content related to sport. Such content includes informative content related to upcoming sports events and statistics, and entertainment content like sport-related humorous sketches and interviews with sportspeople, which drive more audience engagement compared to responsible gambling messages and content promoting operators’ services. Overall, the findings reveal disparities in exposure to gambling marketing based on sports, gender, and type of broadcasting while the distribution of native social media content on Instagram increases the exposure of young people who enjoy sports media consumption to gambling marketing within algorithmic cultures of the platform.