The British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) recently hosted a panel dedicated to solving issues surrounding high-risk players and responsible marketing in the lottery and wider gambling industry.
Representatives from BCLC, Nederlandse Loterij and GamRes came together to discuss how different organisations implement preventative measures and offer support when it comes to high-risk betting activity in a session titled “Responsible Marketing: Establishing ‘Guardrails’ for Safer Betting”.
Floris van Driel, Nederlandse Loterij Responsible Gaming Specialist for Sports Betting and Casino, explained how the Dutch lottery enacted its marketing strategy for the newly formed online marketplace, which was legalised and opened on October 1.
Van Driel’s team scores and advertises each game by risk level. Games rated with a very high-risk score are not promoted at all in television or social media advertising and similarly, high-risk players are excluded from receiving any marketing materials.
“We are looking at high-risk players, and the types of games they prefer, to understand if we should be more restrained when promoting these types of games,” van Driel stated. “It’s really about using specific customer data to customise the campaigns to mitigate risk along with utilising marketing tools to stimulate people to moderate their gameplay.”
Nederlandse Loterij adversities its products in a more light-hearted tone as it aims to ‘reframe the tone of their player health advertising’.
Van Driel added: “We are finding that keeping it lighter and more fun ties in better with the tone of the other communication that we give to the player. The intention is to make it easier for players to accept the message and to get player health behaviour normalised.”
Also participating in the panel was BCLC’s Director of Insights and Player Experience, Ryan Persaud. He explained how the Corporation uses data and statistics to influence how they advertise to its players, guiding its marketing strategy around the behaviour of its players.
“It allowed us to understand: How do [players’] personal stated risks relate to their behaviour? We used that information to help us craft what we are calling…high-risk indicators,” Persaud told the panel.
“At BCLC we are focusing on the player side of assessing risk and using high-risk indicators to dig into the behavioural components as opposed to just the product risks. This player-health data is being used to better inform the conversations we’re having around marketing.”
Lastly, Richard Wood, President of GamRes Limited, underlined the importance of identifying the known and unknown risks of a product before beginning the marketing campaign. Consequently, GamRes developed Gamguard, a gaming risk-management tool aiming to reduce high-risk behaviours.
“With Gamgard, jurisdictions are able to identify high-risk elements and then choose to either not advertise the game at all to high-risk players or to use the data to integrate player health guardrails into their marketing approaches,” Wood explained.
