The Gambling Advertising Market: Who Spends What and Where

What this course covers

Gambling operators are among the largest advertisers in every market where they are licensed, and paid media is one of the biggest lines in their cost base after taxes and the cost of the product itself. Yet the discipline of planning, buying and measuring that media is rarely taught. Existing courses on this site cover the rules (Marketing Compliance and Advertising Standards), the partners (Affiliate Marketing), organic search (iGaming SEO) and retention (CRM and Player Lifecycle). This course covers the money in between: how much operators spend, through which channels, how the platforms and media owners decide who may buy, how sponsorship and broadcast deals work, how creative is built and tested inside the rules, how the results are measured, and how a plan is put together.

This first lesson sets the scale. It uses only published figures from company filings, regulators and named research, each with its date, because figures about gambling advertising are quoted constantly and sourced rarely.

What operators spend

Listed operators disclose marketing spend, but they define it differently, which matters as soon as you compare them. The table below shows the most recent full year for a selection of operators, from their own annual reports and filings. Where a percentage is not stated by the company, it has been calculated here from two figures in the same document, and is marked as such.

The sources are Flutter's 2025 annual report on Form 10-K, DraftKings' 2025 Form 10-K, Super Group's 2025 annual report on Form 20-F, evoke's 2025 results statement, Entain's 2025 annual report and Betsson's 2025 year-end report.

Three patterns are worth taking from it.

Growth markets spend more. Flutter's 10-K splits the picture by segment: its US business spent 18.9% of revenue on sales and marketing in 2025 (calculated from the segment figures), while its international business reported a ratio of 16.1%. The US is still adding states and customers; most of Flutter's international markets are mature. DraftKings' ratio fell from roughly a third of revenue in 2023 to under a quarter in 2025, which is what a maturing customer base does to the arithmetic: revenue from customers acquired in earlier years grows while acquisition spend grows more slowly.

The ratio moves with the calendar. In the first half of 2026, Flutter reported that US sales and marketing rose by 410 basis points as a share of revenue, "primarily driven by investment in the FIFA World Cup, new state launches and in FanDuel Predicts". DraftKings attributed its own first-half increase to customer acquisition around the Super Bowl, the World Cup, the NBA playoffs, two new state launches and its prediction markets product. Major tournaments and market launches are the two largest swing factors in any operator's marketing line, and lesson seven covers how to plan for them.

Definitions differ. Flutter's group line includes amortisation of acquired trademarks, which is an accounting charge, not media. Betsson highlights a ratio that excludes affiliate commission. evoke reports a ratio for its online divisions only. Entain reports "contribution", which it defines as gross profit less marketing costs. None of these is wrong; all of them make naive comparison misleading. The Reading iGaming Financial Results course covers how to normalise them.

Where the money goes

Company filings rarely split spend by channel. For that, the best sources are regulators and named research.

Great Britain. The most complete published split is still an estimate by the analysts Regulus Partners, published by GambleAware. It put total gambling advertising and marketing spend in Great Britain at about £1.5bn in 2017, up from about £1.0bn in 2014.

The government's 2023 white paper, High stakes: gambling reform for the digital age, cited the same estimate, noting that the £1.5bn represented around 7% of the UK advertising sector that year and that online marketing "now accounts for well over half of operators' advertising spend". The figures are nearly a decade old, and no official body has published a newer channel split for Great Britain. Treat them as a picture of the structure of spend, not of its current level.

Spain. Spain's regulator, the DGOJ, publishes marketing spend by category every quarter, which makes it one of the few markets with official, current figures. In the third quarter of 2025, licensed online operators spent €154.84m on marketing: €82.03m on promotions, €54.65m on advertising, €15.86m on affiliates and €2.30m on sponsorship, against gross gaming revenue of €405.36m in the same quarter. Two things stand out. Promotions (bonuses) were the largest single category, larger than advertising. And marketing in total was equivalent to about 38% of gross gaming revenue (calculated), a far higher ratio than most groups report, because it counts bonus costs as marketing rather than netting them off revenue.

The same DGOJ summary records the trend: marketing spend in the quarter was 17.89% higher than a year earlier, with sponsorship up 82.88% and promotions up 23.47%, against gross gaming revenue growth of 16.49%. Spend was growing slightly faster than the market it was competing for, a pattern worth watching in any market's data because it usually signals rising competition for the same customers rather than a growing pool of them.

France. The French regulator, the ANJ, reviews every licensed operator's promotional strategy each year. Its review of plans for 2026 found that the 17 licensed online operators and two monopoly operators planned €785m of promotional spend, up 25% on 2025, made up of €319m of marketing and €466m of financial incentives to players. Digital media took 44% of marketing spend, and the two World Cup months of June and July took 21% of the annual budget. For the first time, the ANJ asked operators not to exceed the budgets they had announced.

Australia. The Australian Communications and Media Authority, using Nielsen data, reported that A$238.63m was spent on gambling advertising on free-to-air television, metropolitan radio and online between May 2022 and April 2023. Metropolitan television took 56% of that, social media 15%, regional television 12%, metropolitan radio 9% and general display 8%. Australia's spend was heavily weighted to broadcast in a way that the British figures were not, which reflects the structure of each market's sports rights and the restrictions in force at the time.

United States. The American Gaming Association, using Nielsen data, reported in March 2026 that sports betting advertising volume fell for the fourth consecutive year, down 1% in 2025 and down 27% from its 2021 peak, with television advertising units nearly half their 2021 level. Volume is not spend, and the AGA is an industry body with an interest in the comparison, but the direction is consistent with the falling marketing ratios in operator filings.

Brand and performance

Every media budget divides, explicitly or not, between brand and performance. Brand spend builds the probability that a person will choose the operator when they come to gamble: television, sponsorship, out-of-home, most audio and video. Performance spend captures demand that exists now: paid search, affiliate placements, paid social with a sign-up objective, retargeting. In gambling the division has a third element that most other sectors lack, which is the offer. A welcome bonus is a marketing cost, it is frequently the largest single element of the cost of acquiring a customer, and depending on accounting treatment it may appear in the marketing line (as in Spain's regulatory data) or be netted against revenue.

A useful way to see the difference is by what each is paid for. Performance channels are usually paid per outcome or per click, so their cost rises and falls with volume. Brand channels are paid for exposure in advance, through a broadcast schedule, a poster campaign or a multi-year sponsorship, so their cost is committed whatever happens. That makes performance spend easier to cut quickly, which is one reason it tends to absorb most of the reductions when budgets tighten.

The working split is a question for lesson seven, but two observations belong here. First, as the tables above show, the measurable performance channels have taken a rising share of gambling spend for a decade. Second, the channels that measure most easily are not necessarily the ones that work best, which is the subject of lesson six.

Why gambling media works differently

A media planner who moves from almost any other category into gambling meets five constraints at once.

Restriction is layered and moving. Statute, licence conditions, advertising codes and platform policy all apply, and they are tightening in most markets. Some of the largest European markets have banned most gambling advertising outright, others restrict it by time of day or by placement, and several are consulting on further limits. The detail is in Marketing Compliance and Advertising Standards; the media consequence is that the available inventory differs by market, by product and by hour.

Access is certified. The self-serve platforms that dominate digital media either require gambling advertisers to be certified market by market or refuse them entirely, and media owners in broadcast and out-of-home apply their own codes. Lesson two covers how this works and why it changes so often.

The audience must be filtered as well as found. In most categories, reaching the wrong person is waste. In gambling, reaching an under-18, a self-excluded customer or someone showing signs of harm is a regulatory failure. Every buy carries an exclusion obligation as well as a targeting objective, and lesson four covers how that is built into programmatic and social buying.

The competition is partly illegal. Unlicensed operators buy media too, often through channels licensed operators cannot or will not use. In September 2026, iGaming Times reported Entain's count that 11 of 20 Premier League clubs carried an unlicensed gambling sponsor in some capacity. A licensed operator's share of voice is measured against competitors that face none of its constraints.

Demand is event-driven. Sports betting demand follows the fixture list, and casino demand follows paydays, weekends and seasons. The World Cup concentration in the ANJ data is typical, and it means the cost of media rises precisely when every competitor wants it.

Reading the numbers with care

When a figure about gambling advertising appears in a presentation, five questions test it.

1. Whose number is it? A company filing, a regulator and a campaign group will each have different methods and different interests.
2. What year? The most cited British channel split is from 2017. A figure without a year is not a figure.
3. What is counted? Advertising only, or marketing including affiliates, promotions and sponsorship? Including or excluding amortisation?
4. Spend or volume? Counts of advertisements, impressions and pounds spent move differently, especially when media prices change.
5. Licensed market only? Most official figures cover licensed operators. Unlicensed spend is unmeasured.

The direction of travel

The trends in the published data point the same way. Marketing ratios at large operators are falling as their customer bases mature, while spend concentrates around tournaments and launches. Regulators are moving from rules about what an advertisement says to limits on how much is spent and when, as France's budget cap shows. And new categories are entering the market for attention: the AGA reported in August 2026 that prediction market operators had spent nearly $200m on digital advertising in the first seven months of 2026. The rest of this course is about spending well in that environment: fewer channels, more scrutiny, and less room for spend that cannot show it worked.