From paid partnerships and podcasts to ‘party holes’, the TAB and its youth-focused subsidiary Betcha are making a concerted effort to attract young people to gambling. Shanti Mathias reports.
A group of men are crowded around a golf green, waiting for a ball. When it’s successfully putted into the hole, they start cheering. I swipe to the next video. A lean, muscled man does some training outside, puts on a NZ Warriors T-shirt, eats a healthy lunch, then has a “flutter” on the TAB app. “You’ve worked hard for this life, enjoy every minute of it,” someone writes in the comments. Another Instagram Reel. A group of women get dressed up to go to the races, partying in a tent full of disco balls, then leaning close to the race track to watch the horses galloping by. The next video is an ongoing segment in which two men discuss whether they’ll “bet or forget” on upcoming competitions.
This is a universe of paid partnerships, sponsored podcasts, exclusive invites for influencers and underneath it all, gambling, all carefully choreographed and reduced to catchy Instagram Reels. Many of these posts have been paid for: individuals with significant social media followings (usually upwards of 5,000 followers) receive money and other perks, like free tickets to events, food or transport costs; in exchange, brands usually get to vet the content that is posted, and are tagged in videos or photos.
It’s been more than a year since TAB, New Zealand’s only licensed betting platform, partnered with the London Stock Exchange-listed gambling giant Entain. Entain committed $900m in investment to take over the TAB’s betting and broadcasting operations for 25 years. Since then, even while many companies have been cutting their advertising spend, the TAB and its youth-focused subsidiary Betcha has been everywhere: billboards, TV, podcasts, radio and your Instagram feed. The generation of people who grew up going down to the TAB to place bets on the horses is getting older: the gambling industry needs young people to get involved.
Murky regulation
Gambling advertising is regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority. Influencers and athletes have run into trouble in recent years promoting gambling via social media, including former New Zealand cricketer and England test coach Brendon McCullum, who ended his partnership with online gambling company 22Bet after the Problem Gambling Foundation complained to the Department of Internal Affairs about his YouTube posts promoting it (only Lotto NZ and the TAB are allowed to advertise gambling in New Zealand). DIA was unable to take action due to YouTube being an overseas company. He was also investigated by the English Cricket Board.
Māori influencers, meanwhile, have spoken out against online casinos approaching them to ask for promotion. “The use of this technology for advertising is a relatively new thing,” says Maria Bellringer, director of AUT’s Gambling and Addiction Research Centre.
Some of the influencer posts that are direct paid partnerships with TAB subsidiary Betcha or the TAB itself include a note that says “R18, Gamble Responsibly”, as do some of the videos that the TAB and Betcha post directly. Bellringer points out that this phrase, which is often used in messaging from the gambling industry, is vague. “How am I supposed to know whether I’m gambling responsibly? It doesn’t mean anything, it just pushes the onus onto the gambler.”
Many of the posts The Spinoff found, posted by influencers as well as from the Betcha and TAB accounts, however, do not have any mention of harm reduction resources for gambling. All TAB and Betcha social media accounts include a note in the bio that followers must be above 18, the legal gambling age (and in line with rules that gambling advertising must not be aimed at children and those below 18). Posts that promote events one step removed from gambling, like racing festival The Grand Tour or golf spectacle Chasing The Fox, don’t need to include any such disclosure.
As a result, Bellringer says, digital promotion of gambling can make messaging around harm reduction less prominent. The Entain “safer gambling” page is linked to in small print at the bottom of the Betcha and TAB websites under a full page of odds for NBA games, the Brazilian women’s football league and a darts championship. “People aren’t going to scroll to find the tiny print,” says Bellringer.
Marketing ‘a true social experience’
A lot of advertising money in particular has gone to Betcha, a TAB subsidiary launched in August that was developed with the intention of making gambling more accessible for people aged under 35. A few months before the launch, Entain New Zealand’s managing director Cameron Rodger told the NZ Herald the brand would give a group of customers who feel that “TAB isn’t the brand for them or doesn’t resonate with them” a different option, “something that they feel like they can have an identity and connect to”. In a statement to The Spinoff, Rodger said that Betcha makes gambling “a true social experience, emphasising the social and competitive value of sports”.
“The gambling industry, not just here but also in Australia and the UK, is trying to attract a younger demographic to gambling,” says Bellringer. The US, too, has seen much more widespread sports gambling since a Supreme Court ruling in 2018 made it possible for individual states to allow online sports betting. While the TAB’s dark blue and serif font looks more traditional, Betcha’s branding – bright blue and orange, lower case writing – bears an obvious resemblance to trendy sports betting apps from overseas, like the swirl of Draft Kings from the US (orange and green), the minimal black and white of Betway from the UK and Australia’s purple Dabble (sample website review: “active in the community and always helps the punters”). In Australia, particularly, young people have been targeted by at least $287m of gambling industry advertising.
The most recent comprehensive New Zealand Health and Lifestyles survey, from 2020, showed 14.5% of men in the adult population had gambled via the TAB, while only 7.3% of women had. It’s difficult to establish causality: do more men participate in sports betting because sports in general is seen as a male domain? Or are men more vulnerable to the marketing techniques used by gambling companies? More involvement from women in both sports and betting is clearly on the TAB/Betcha’s wishlist: former White Fern and sports commentator Katey Martin has posted videos promoting Betcha, as has Sky Sports broadcaster Courtney Tairi.
Unlike some posts from young men, which explicitly show them placing bets on the TAB website, the posts from women are less direct. A vlog from one influencer shows preparation for a day at the races: an early start for hair and makeup, “making sure we see a horse”, pictures of the “girlies’ feet getting sore” from dancing and the note that “we won $0 lol”. “We’re going to the races and you’re coming with me,” begins another video showing a day of dancing and snazzy dresses, ending with the note “tell me if you won anything… overall incredible experience”. These posts are tagged as ads for The Grand Tour, a “racing festival” sponsored by Love Racing, a subsidiary of New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing, and Betcha NZ. “The festival aims to re-invigorate a movement around horse racing, reimagining it as a festival-style experience to engage and shift perceptions amongst a younger audience,” reads an article on Stop Press about the events. It is The Grand Tour, rather than Betcha or the racing industry directly, which is paying for a partnership with these influencers. “For the fashion girlies who enjoy days out in the sun and absolute vibes, this is your sign to book your tickets to The Grand Tour,” reads the caption of one Instagram post from a paid partnership with The Grand Tour, complete with pictures of heels and a soundbite from an Addison Rae song.
“There’s a focus on getting young women involved by portraying [racing] as a night out, making it a bit glamorous, a chance to dress up, have fun, have a few drinks, and have some bets at the same time,” says Bellringer. The influencer marketing adds to this: people follow influencers because their lifestyles are desirable.
Going to the races is one step removed from actually gambling, but the two are intrinsically linked. Ninety percent of the horse racing industry’s money comes from gambling. Of course, portraying horse racing as a fun reason to dress up and get drunk with your friends is nothing new, but in the digital era, Instagram’s tagging system shows how much gambling money is integrated with the whole enterprise.
Influencer marketing works in tandem with real-life events
Entain says that influencer marketing is just a way to meet audiences where they are. “[Younger people] are generally not consumers of traditional media, so it makes sense for us to communicate through social media and through influencers,” Rodger said, in response to The Spinoff’s questions about Entain’s marketing strategy. Rodger suggested that marketing Betcha and the TAB was a way to prevent New Zealanders from spending money on offshore gambling sites which have no regulation or harm minimisation. “The rise of offshore betting operators in the past decade has been the main barrier for newer generations being able to enjoy and engage in sports betting with the right safeguards in place,” he said.
In New Zealand, the complex web of sponsorships and events takes place offline, too. Take “Chasing the Fox,” the second iteration of an event held on Friday, December 13 in Auckland that pitted New Zealand golfer Ryan Fox against politicians (David Seymour and John Key), media personalities (Dai Henwood and Jeremy Wells), plus well-known past and present Warriors, All Blacks, Black Caps and Olympians. Its lead sponsor was the TAB, with casino group SkyCity listed as an associate partner and other sponsors including Heineken, Red Bull, American Express and Porsche. A much-hyped “party hole” (the final hole of the six-hole course, turned into a spectator-friendly “party”) was sponsored by Betcha.
The event was promoted heavily in the media (“We’re going to be pretty focused on the party hole, which sounds like something that the Royal Auckland Golf Club has never seen before,” broadcaster Scotty Stevenson, who presented the event’s live coverage on TVNZ, told The Spinoff), and multiple stories appeared in the Herald and in other media outlets. It was all over social media, too, with “Foxcatcher” merch, posts from Canadian golfer/influencer Mac Boucher, who has 508,000 followers on Instagram, and the Alternative Commentary Collective posting golf reels. None of these pieces of media explicitly endorse gambling: instead, it’s just in the air, part of a fun, summery, celebrity-filled sports event and promoted online and by traditional media alike.
Almost all of the celebrities featured in Chasing the Fox are men, as are many of the influencers who have promoted Betcha and the TAB directly online. Popular account Boys Get Paid, spun out of a Facebook group, now has a podcast under the Alternative Commentary Collective banner, focused on racing. Its Instagram account, with 21,000 followers, posts things like a meme of a baby crying and pointing at a horse, with the caption “when you tell your wife what you want for Christmas”.
“It’s like old adverts for casinos, with bowties and ballgowns, everyone is drinking cocktails or champagne, famous people are there,” says Bellringer, who scrolled through a number of examples of influencer posts before speaking to The Spinoff. “It makes gambling socially acceptable. It doesn’t show the downsides, or what the real chances of winning are.”
Rodger says these sponsorships are necessary so that younger New Zealanders gamble “with harm minimisation in place”. But there’s another motivation, too. “The bottom line is that the TAB wouldn’t pay for influencers or events if it wasn’t productive for them,” says Bellringer.