Playing an online slot game while bowling? Doing yoga? Having a meal with friends?
That’s all portrayed as perfectly normal in a new slots advertising campaign from DraftKings Casino, a product legal and regulated in five states, plus Alberta and Ontario, Canada.
Take a look below at the advertisement DraftKings released on Aug. 24.
Why It Matters
A gambling journalist could spend all their time criticizing specific gambling ads if they wished, so most go unremarked on — but sometimes there’s one so dystopian that it can’t easily be dismissed as trivial slop once your eyeballs unfortunately come across it while doomscrolling on social media. Journalism should be advertising’s antithesis, so what good is the former if it doesn’t critically analyze the latter?
In this instance, DraftKings labeled its new slots campaign “Spin Your Way” — presumably through life, repeatedly pressing your phone screen on digitized one-armed bandits while doing virtually any random social activity with friends or family.
This advertising shows the emptiness of “responsible gambling” (RG) as a regulatory framework. The ad, which satisfies the RG requirement of a helpline number, promotes behaviors that may run afoul of two DSM-5 criteria for gambling disorder: preoccupation with gambling and jeopardizing relationships.
If you’re bowling with friends and miss your turn because your face is buried in your phone playing slots on the DraftKings app, you may be showing those two characteristics of gambling addiction. This is, of course, not a diagnosis.
Close friends may ask you if everything is OK if they notice you using DraftKings while about to roll your bowling ball. Others may just never invite you to go bowling — or anywhere for that matter — again.
The DraftKings ad also showed someone gambling while using a revolving door, which seems slightly physically risky but obviously not anywhere close to jeopardizing physical safety. The revolving-door metaphor for a human inside a slot machine is quite tedious.
The advertisement included someone playing DraftKings from a dentist’s chair, which, to be fair, can be a boring place and perhaps an opportune moment for a little screen time. But, again, preoccupation with gambling, a core sign of an addiction, could be at play here.
Advertising for many products attempts to make them look cool, fun, and exciting. Can you do that for an online slot game without making it look like problem gambling? We won’t say it’s impossible, but DraftKings was egregious in this campaign for inserting the purported entertainment of an online slot into social environments where people are supposed to connect with others.
Tragically, there is a loneliness crisis, according to medical experts, and advertising like this for an online gambling product simply leans into our isolation from each other.
Oh, by the way, did you catch the ad’s disclosure, which only flashed on screen for a fraction of a second, that the slot game images were “simulated”? Advertising only slot wins, with no one losing, with such an easy-to-miss disclosure, is a “responsible gambling” topic for another day.
