Ontario’s online gambling market regulator recently urged media companies to stop advertising unlicensed gaming sites in the province and beyond. The Canadian industry may be keenly interested in the fact that Meta has quietly updated its requirements for gambling adverts on Facebook and Instagram.
Effective immediately, in order to promote any form of online gambling on those two platforms, written permission must be obtained from the company and would-be advertisers must provide significant documentation.
Meta’s definition of gambling includes “betting, lotteries, raffles, casino games, fantasy sports, bingo, poker, skill game tournaments and sweepstakes,” and the policy applies to any paid-entry games in which anything of monetary value is included as part of the prize.
“Meta defines online gambling and gaming as any product or service where anything of monetary value is included as part of a method of entry and prize,” noted the company.
Rules impact influencers and affiliates too
The new requirements don’t just apply to direct advertising of gambling but also to ads with landing pages that contain promotions for online gambling, even if there is no opportunity to gamble directly on that page, such as aggregator or affiliate sites.
They also target influencer marketing. For a creator to publish a gambling advert themselves, they must register with Meta, obtain approval as an affiliate and show a signed agreement with the gambling operator they are advertising.
As for what the policy does not apply to, social casinos and free-play games that do not offer anything of monetary value are exempt. However, there is a strict ban on targeting users under 18, and that aspect does apply to ads for free-play content as well as real-money gambling.
Applications for permission to advertise gambling must be submitted through Meta’s “Permissions and Verifications” portal in its Business Suite. Meta’s internal teams will manually review submissions, and approvals are account-specific, with additional business profiles having to go through a separate approval process.
Credentials, please
Perhaps most notably, any entity applying to advertise real-money gambling must be able to provide evidence “that the gambling activities are appropriately licensed by a regulator or otherwise established as lawful in territories that they want to target.”
Would-be advertisers will have to submit detailed paperwork, including current gambling licenses and certifications of compliance with law in all regions where the adverts are being shown, as well as corporate details, screenshots and a list of ad accounts.
While it creates more red tape for operators and their affiliates, it will surely please the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO).
Two months ago, the province’s gambling regulator stated that it had written to a host of traditional and digital media platforms to urge them to stop advertising unregulated online gambling sites in the province. Specifically calling out offshore operator Bodog, the AGCO said that legitimate media companies offer unauthorized operators “a veneer of legitimacy” by allowing them to promote themselves through various channels.
The AGCO did not confirm at the time whether Meta was one of the platforms it had written to. Canadian Gaming Business reached out to the AGCO seeking confirmation and comment.
Talk of the town
While the AGCO didn’t name Meta, the Canadian Gaming Association (CGA) has done so publicly on several occasions. The industry association has questioned whether social media sites, led by Meta, should be taking a harder stance. CGB also reached out to the CGA for comment.
The AGCO, the CGA, research firm Ipsos, gambling company executives and others have all suggested that too much confusion remains among consumers as to which gaming sites are legitimately authorized and which are not. They argued a glut of adverts for unlicensed sites sitting alongside the marketing of licensed platforms only exacerbates the problem.
Meanwhile, as all this is happening, a federal discussion of whether or not to start nationally regulating betting adverts in Canada (and if so, how) is back on the agenda in Parliament for 2025.
Sen. Marty Deacon’s Bill S-211, her re-fired version of last year’s S-269 which passed the Senate but never made progress in the House of Commons, has had two readings in the Senate and is awaiting committee debate.
