Should Gambling Be Marketed As Entertainment?

Marketing gambling as entertainment is a drum I have been banging for quite some time. That said, I’ve never been able to plainly explain my thoughts on the subject, despite spending several years mulling it over.

After writing a column dissecting Jason Robins’ statements about what kind of customer DraftKings is interested in attracting, it suddenly dawned on me. The epiphany was that I had a single but essential word wrong.  

At its core, gambling isn’t an entertainment product. It’s a product that drives engagement. Any entertainment gleaned from gambling is a byproduct of engagement. Yes, the goal is to have customers who gamble for entertainment, but that doesn’t mean gambling is an entertainment product.

For gambling, entertainment is one of the potential outcomes when engagement is the key to a product’s success.  

This is tricky because it’s easy to step over the line and land in addiction – unlike a straight entertainment product like music. When they are engaged in gambling, many people will be entertained. Some won’t. When it comes to music, you never hear of people who can’t stop listening to music they can’t stand.

The end goal is to have as many positively engaged customers as possible while limiting the number of negatively engaged people, which is easier said than done. This crossroads appears to be where the industry is searching for answers.

Engagement Can Lead to Harm

When engagement is the core of the product, the product is what the customer makes of it. In that respect, gambling is similar to social media.

Social media sites are meant to be engaging, not entertaining (far too many people hate-use social media), but that engagement can spiral into addiction and misuse for some. Like social media sites, a gambling site can say they want people to use it as a form of entertainment, but that first requires them to find your product engaging. And that same engagement will be harmful to a percentage of customers.

So, when the industry shifts its messaging to gambling for entertainment, what they mean is they are marketing to customers more likely to have an enjoyable experience. Additionally, it means they will put policies in place and set up guardrails to dissuade value-seeking customers and identify customers showing signs of addiction.

The gambling ecosystem is like a game of Plinko, and the industry is trying to skew the odds in two ways.

Step 1: The Player Funnel

The first is at the point of entry. Its marketing efforts attempt to increase the number of entry points for entertainment gamblers while decreasing the entry points of professionals, value-hunters, and problem gamblers.

Essentially, the industry is attempting to attract customers predisposed to use their product for gambling entertainment purposes. That means a reduced focus on making money and things like competitive odds. In its place, the industry is marketing the social aspects of gambling and pushing the potential payoff of longshot parlays and other “fun” bets.

If our Plinko game has 12 entry points, the goal is to be a discerning doorman and only let the “right” type of player pass through.

Step 2: Building Guardrails

Guarding the door is far from foolproof, so the industry is also implementing policies that elicit behaviors from players who gained entry.

Much like an unmoderated forum or comment section will quickly devolve into chaos, gambling sites that don’t set boundaries and provide customers with prudent guardrails will find themselves to be a magnet for problematic players.

When done correctly, these guardrails will fluster customers who expect to win. Value-hunters will see lucrative offers dry up. And at-risk gamblers will find it more challenging to engage in the behaviors that lead to problem gambling.

Circling back to our imagined Plinko game, the guardrails don’t necessarily keep people out of the ecosystem. Instead, the guardrails steer them towards the desired landing spot once they get through the door. So rather than a random distribution, players are more likely to land where the site wants them to land.

Imagine twelve potential landing spots. Six would lead to entertainment players without the guardrails, leaving two for value-hunters, two for professionals, and two for problem gamblers.

The industry believes it can flip some of the latter categories or cap them with guardrails to prevent players from landing in them. So instead of the six, two, two, two distribution, the Plinko board might shift a couple of buckets to change the distribution to eight, two, one, one. Or reduce the total number of “negative” buckets, leaving a distribution of six, two, one, one.

The bottom line is this: The industry is taking a two-pronged approach to value entertainment-driven customers and devalue what t sees as problematic customers.