A major research review of marketing in 13 jurisdictions across 16 years says the “digital delivery” of online gambling products is a core reason they are extremely difficult to regulate.
The paper, published in September 2026, reviewed a wide array of gambling operator “adaptations to marketing restrictions” over the time period. The findings were striking but consistent with familiar patterns of regulatory circumvention and displacement. Even so, the study suggests countries could regulate the advertising more effectively through the kind of approach developed for tobacco.
Researchers from the U.K., Australia, and China concluded that “effective gambling marketing regulation requires statutory, comprehensive, and future-proof frameworks rather than the voluntary, circumventable, and reactive approaches” that they evaluated.
A Different Beast
Italy and Belgium, two of the jurisdictions examined, have what the researchers described as “near-total” gambling advertising bans. Still, even these policies “proved porous, with operators exploiting transitional exemptions, developing surrogate branding strategies, and reallocating spend to operator-owned media channels.”
Online gambling operators can “adapt at a speed and scale that was not possible with physical commodities like tobacco and alcohol,” researchers wrote.
The researchers nevertheless argued that policymakers have an advantage their predecessors confronting tobacco and alcohol did not.
“The difference is that the evidentiary groundwork already exists … The independent [gambling] research community has built a substantial and growing evidence base capable of informing anticipatory, comprehensive, and statutory approaches, and continued research efforts will ensure it keeps pace with operator adaptation. The gap, however, is no longer primarily in the evidence, but in the political will to act on it.”
The authors noted that restrictions on inducements, including bonuses and sign-up offers, had “measurable behavioral change.” Nonetheless, operators often adapt by directing promotions “towards retention and reactivation of existing accounts.”
US Reform Efforts
In the U.S. context, tobacco advertising reform saw real success through several federal statutes and a landmark late-1990s settlement with the industry. Right now, among the strongest federal proposals to regulate the online betting industry are the SAFE Bet Act and GAME Act, though the latter is much narrower. Those bills could be the starting points for addressing what former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams described as the “new opioid crisis.”
State-sanctioned online sports betting outside Nevada expanded following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992. From there, under the second Trump administration, so-called prediction markets rapidly rolled out stock-market-style sports gambling, claiming the products fall under federal commodities law rather than state gambling laws.
In the U.S., the struggle to deal a meaningful blow to growing online gambling addiction is still in its early organizing stages. Whether it will take as long as the fight against big tobacco remains to be seen.
