Betfair Ordered by ASA to Take Down Billboards

Although online gambling is legal in the United Kingdom, as is the advertising thereof, it does not mean that online gambling companies can advertise what they want when they want, as leading online betting exchange Betfair found out this week, when it was ordered to take down two billboards.

The two billboards in question were ordered to be taken down by the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA), the UK's official advertising and marketing 'watchdog' organization. The ASA made the decision after it received complaints from 'UK statistics watchdog', Straight Statistics, about Betfair's campaign.

Straight Statistics' complained that the ad's claim that Betfair's odds are '40 percent better than SP' was misleading. The stats firm argued that the majority of people would understand the ad to mean that if they placed a bet with Betfair, they could gain a 40 percent better return than betting at Starting Price (SP).

Said a Straight Statistics spokesperson, 'The kind of comparison Betfair used is misleading because long-priced horses are much longer-priced on Betfair, and therefore distort returns calculated in the advertised way. The average punter backs a short-priced winner much more often than a long-priced winner.'

After considering the complaint in detail, ASA adjudicators determined that Betfair's claim '40 percent better than SP' was not qualified in any way, and that Straight Statistics was correct in their summation that consumers who viewed the billboard ads were likely to be mislead by Betfair's figures which were skewed.