Lights, Camera… Advertising Standards Agency!
The popular online bingo site, Lights Camera Bingo, has had a slap on the wrist from the ASA after a complaint against them was made.
The nature of the complaint focussed on irresponsible advertising in relation to potential problem gambling and gambling harm, although to be fair to Lights Camera Bingo, it’s a pretty pedantic one.
The popular bingo website belongs to Jumpman Gaming, a multi brand operation, and has had to remove the offending marketing material.
This is what happened and why.
Why did Lights Camera Bingo get into Trouble?
Firstly, although it was Lights Camera Bingo that was named in the complaint, the company that owns the brand, Jumpman Gaming, are the people ultimately responsible.
They operate many online bingo websites, Lights Camera Bingo is just one of them, and they used a similar retention technique across many of them.
Secondly, it’s not so much that they got into trouble, they were just told that what they were doing was not in line with their license conditions as a responsible gambling services provider, and therefore had to stop.
What were they doing?
If you have lots of websites open in your browser, you will see all of the tabs have little icons – usually the brand logo – and a few words in them. The icons are called ‘favicons’ and the words are usually the name of the site.
Lights Camera Bingo had their favicon up there, but instead of the name of their site, the words “Hey! Come back!” were on display.
This isn’t a new idea, many companies do this, especially those that are trying to sell you something; however, with Lights Camera Bingo being a gambling service, the rules are different.
Potential to Cause Gambling Harm
Despite Jumpman Gaming saying that the message would mostly only be seen by the 5% of their customer base who access the site via a desktop (some mobile users might see a slightly different version), the ASA upheld the complaint.
Jumpman also stated that there was no specific call to action, and no reward or incentives offered to coax anyone back to their website, and the purpose of the message was to alert the user that they had not logged out of their account or closed the webpage.
However, the ASA considered this information but still decided that this qualified as a marketing communication by the operator.
In their response, they said:
“We considered that by displaying a call to action to “come back”, that would be understood as an instruction, strongly encouraging consumers to return to using the website, when they had either paused their bingo play or stopped play by leaving the web page.”
“We accepted that displaying ads which invited someone to visit a website, or reminded them to return to a web page, such as to complete a purchase or other action that was in progress, would likely not be problematic of itself. However, we considered that such messaging, in the context of an ad for an online bingo service, could have the effect of encouraging some people to continue gambling when they would otherwise have stopped, especially as the message did not disappear until the web page was returned to. We also considered that particularly in the case of people who had a gambling problem or were recovering gambling addicts, the message could exploit the susceptibilities of vulnerable people.”
So basically, if you’re selling people homeware, or flowers, or holidays or whatever then it’s ok to use this sort of marketing communication, but if you are selling gambling services, it’s not.
The ASA must have seen this as a minor infraction too since no further action has been taken, and now at least the industry has more clarity on what is and isn’t allowed.
Telling people to ‘Come back’ is a breach of the CAP Code (Edition 12).