A major complaint from people since legal sports betting in the US became so prevalent is that they are inundated with television ads from gambling operators. While the industry spends big on marketing – DraftKings forked out $1.26bn last year – new data from Nielsen paints a slightly different picture:
The only countries in the world that currently allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise prescription drugs on television are the US and New Zealand, with these messages being 38x more frequent than sports betting ads in the 50 states.
sportsbook operators are much more likely to focus their ad spend on sports-related programming
The data does need to be taken with a grain of salt, as sportsbook operators are much more likely to focus their ad spend on sports-related programming, while pharma companies can take a more scatter-gun approach.
People still see a large number of sports betting television ads during live broadcasts, and many media companies integrate odds in their pre-game and in-game graphics.
