The effectiveness of betting odds in digital gambling advertising for sports betting

ABSTRACT

Digital gambling advertising is omnipresent nowadays and leads young adults easily and directly to online gambling websites, challenging their self-control and inducing impulsive behaviors. The current study examines how including betting odds in digital gambling advertising for sports betting affects young adults’ gambling intentions and gambling attitudes toward sports betting and whether positive affective reactions toward the advertising can explain this. In addition, the moderating roles of gender and advertising format are investigated. The results of a two (advertising strategy: no odds advertising versus odds advertising) by two (digital advertising format: social media ad versus online banner) between-subjects experiment among 150 young adults (18 to 25 years) show that odds advertising (compared to an ad not including odds) led to more positive affective reactions toward the sports betting advertisement, which subsequently positively affected both gambling intentions and gambling attitudes. However, these results were only true for men and not for women. Finally, there was no moderating role of digital advertising format.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital gambling advertising
• odds advertising
• sports betting
• gambling intention
• gambling attitude
• advertising format

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lucas Scharpé for his help with developing the stimulus material and collecting the data.

Disclosure statement

This work was supported by Research Foundation - Flanders under Grant 12R9222N.

The authors declare no constraints on publishing nor conflicts of interest exist that readers should know about in relation to this manuscript.

Preregistration statement

The authors declare that there is no pre-registration in relation to this study.

Data availability statement

The data will be made available upon request.

Ethical approval

The ethical review board of Social and Human Sciences, University of Antwerp.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steffi De Jans

Steffi De Jans is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication Sciences at Ghent University. She conducts research on how consumers can be empowered to cope with digital advertising for dark consumption behavior (i.e. advertising for harmful products or behavior such as gambling and unhealthy eating behavior).