Out of sports: The influence of structural and situational characteristics in online sports betting

In a paper that I recently co-wrote in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues with Hibai Lopez-Gonzalez and Ana Estevez, we argued that the growing conversion of sports betting into an online activity has prompted two types of transformations in the way companies market their betting products. Firstly, the Internet has not only extended the opportunities to bet but has also changed the characteristics of the betting practice itself. Such product characteristics can be divided into two categories, namely situational and structural characteristics, that appear to be associated with factors influencing the onset and maintaining of betting as well as the difficulty of discontinuing it (the focus of this blog). Secondly, the online dimension has also enabled the proliferation of cross-marketing strategies leading to a convergence between previously independent markets or the tightening of the relationship between those with already established synergies (which I will examine in a future blog).

The internet has substantially transformed the situational and structural characteristics of sports betting. Situational factors comprise all environmental features that might make gamblers feel comfortable (both psychologically and physically) while gambling including sensory factors like colour, music, and smell in the environment, novelty of the activity, accessibility or proximity to a gambling venue, social facilitation and intrinsic association, which is defined as ‘the degree to which gambling is associated with other interests and attractions’.

New situational factors in online sports betting include: (i) easier and faster accessibility to betting opportunities; (ii) ubiquity of bettable competitions around the globe and seamless availability of those competitions around the clock; (iii) anonymity (in terms of social stigma traditionally attached to gambling) and comfortable betting from home or elsewhere via mobile devices; (iv) greater social facilitation via online communities of bettors or betting leagues organized between groups of friends; and (v) an enhanced intrinsic association of sports betting with sporting values such as health, competition, team identification and loyalty, further facilitated by the proliferation of live sport content on television and social media.

Structural factors refer to the specific characteristics or design of the gambling activity such as win probability, sound and lighting effects of the game, bet frequency (how many bets a person can place in a given period of time), loss chasing facilitation (gambling to recover lost money), jackpot size, price structure, near-miss opportunities (the psychological bias of interpreting losses as nearly wins or anticipatory of a winning streak).

New structural factors in online betting include: (i) a greater frequency of bets, with shorter intervals between bets, and shorter event durations (e.g., virtual sports), meaning faster reward mechanisms; (ii) in-play betting, which encompasses a closer connection between watching sport and betting; (iii) contextual betting, with live markets that open after specific actions (e.g. betting on the outcome of a penalty kick seconds after being awarded by the referee); (iv) greater illusion of control over the bets with new functionalities that emphasize the skills involved and diminish the role of luck, such as cash out (the person can withdraw the bet before the end of the event at the price stipulated by the betting site), accumulators (a person can aggregate multiple events in a single bet, increasing the potential return), exchange (betting against other people instead of the bookmaker); and (v) a greater integration in the betting process of the knowledge about the sport (e.g., daily fantasy sports), resulting in the gamification of the betting experience.

In a 2013 scoping study that I published with Dr. Abby McCormack in the International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning, we noted that new situational and structural factors associated with Internet gambling could influence the onset of problem gambling in non-sporting gambling contexts. The relative novelty of these situational and structural characteristics affecting the wagering on sports is reflected in the scarcity of research devoted to understanding them. However, there are a few studies.

An analysis of 47,603 Bwin betting website subscribers (by Dr. Debi LaPLante and colleagues in the journal Computers in Human Behaviors) showed some interesting results in the direction of the importance of structural factors determining excessive gambling. The most involved bettors (those comprising the most active 1% of the user sample) who gambled on final outcomes did not escalate their gambling behaviour over time whereas those who gambled in-play did so. In a 2014 follow-up study in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, LaPlante and her colleagues examined the effect of in-play betting in the development of problem gambling. The researchers expanded the sample to other forms of gambling and compared the role of breadth (i.e., many different gambling forms) and depth involvement (i.e., more frequent betting) in problem gambling onset. They hypothesised that more involved users would be more likely to become problem gamblers (which was shown to be the case). For every form and gambling, when controlling for depth and breadth involvement, the model was not able to predict gambling-related problems, with one exception: in-play betting. The study suggested that a structural characteristic of a game, the live betting action, could be a precipitant, in conjunction with other determinants, of gambling disorders.

Another study by Dr. Richard LaBrie and Dr. Howard Shaffer (in a 2011 issue of Addiction Research and Theory) found that self-limiting features – in which the bettor determines a maximum amount of money to be bet – made problem gamblers bet less frequently but, in turn, increased the stakes of the bets placed. Bettors who scored high on problem gambling scales chased their losses by implementing a risk aversion strategy, placing high bets conservatively on short odds events (i.e., events with unbalanced contenders in which the outcome can more likely be determined beforehand but with a lower monetary return).

While there has been an increasing amount of research that has examined the influence of situational and structural characteristics in gambling (particularly in relation to slot machine gambling), the impact of such characteristics on online sports betting (at present) remains largely unknown.

(Please not that this article was co-written with Dr. Hibai Lopez-Gonzalez and Dr. Ana Estevez).

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. (1993). Fruit machine gambling: The importance of structural characteristics. Journal of Gambling Studies, 9, 101-120.

Griffiths, M.D. (1999). Gambling technologies: Prospects for problem gambling. Journal of Gambling Studies, 15(3), 265–283.

Griffiths, M.D. (2005). A biopsychosocial approach to addiction. Psyke & Logos, 26(1), 9–26.

Griffiths, M.D. & Auer, M. (2013) The irrelevancy of game-type in the acquisition, development and maintenance of problem gambling. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, (621). doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00621.

LaBrie, R. & Shaffer, H.J. (2011). Identifying behavioral markers of disordered Internet sports gambling. Addiction Research & Theory, 19(1), 56–65.

LaPlante, D., Nelson, S.E. & Gray, H.M. (2014). Breadth and depth involvement: Understanding Internet gambling involvement and its relationship to gambling problems. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 28(2), 396-403.

LaPlante, D.A., Schumann, A., LaBrie, R.A., et al. (2008). Population trends in Internet sports gambling. Computers in Human Behavior, 24(5), 2399–2414.

Leino, T., Torsheim, T., Blaszczynski, A., Griffiths, M.D., Mentzoni, R., Pallesen, S. & Molde, H. (2015). The relationship between structural characteristics and gambling behavior: A population based study. Journal of Gambling Studies, 31, 1297-1315.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H., Estevez, A. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Marketing and advertising online sports betting: A problem gambling perspective. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Is European online gambling regulation adequately addressing in-play betting advertising? Gaming Law Review and Economics, 20, 495-503.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Understanding the convergence of online sports betting markets. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). ‘Cashing out’ in sports betting: Implications for problem gambling and regulation. Gaming Law Review and Economics, in press.

McCormack, A. & Griffiths, M.D. (2013). A scoping study of the structural and situational characteristics of internet gambling., 3(1), 29–49.

Parke, J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2006). The psychology of the fruit machine: The role of structural characteristics (revisited). International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 4, 151-179.

Parke, J. & Griffiths, M.D. (2007). The role of structural characteristics in gambling.  In G. Smith, D. Hodgins & R. Williams (Eds.), Research and Measurement Issues in Gambling Studies (pp.211-243). New York: Elsevier.

Teaming reign: A brief look at marketing convergence in online sports betting

The marketing cycle of a typical online betting firm aptly illustrates the converging nature of sports and its neighbouring industries. For instance, consider the following football narrative. A betting site buys advertisement space in a national newspaper. The online edition of that newspaper accompanies the advertisement with an active link. If a user clicks on it and access the betting site, the newspaper as an affiliate marketer will get 30% of the money that user has lost betting. In order to boost the number of users clicking on it, the paper publishes next to it a news article featuring Real Madrid on the eve of a match against Manchester United with the following headline: ‘Cristiano Ronaldo scored in 4 of his last 5 visits to Old Trafford’. Now, the journalist shares the link to that piece of news on Twitter, predicting a goal from Ronaldo, with a non-negligible likelihood that he or she is in business with a betting company, according to what was found in a 2014 sample of the ten most followed sports journalists in Spain.

The tweet might be read by someone at home, or even in the stands of a stadium as the game is being played, in which case a betting company might have sponsored the installation of high-speed Wi-Fi connection to facilitate bets. The bet will be preferably made in the proprietary app of the team, who partnered with the betting firm for an amount of money in exchange for adorning the stadium with the brand’s logo, although exclusivity in the electronic banners surrounding the pitch is not possible since the home team must comply with the different betting partners of the league.

Chances are that those at home watching the game on television will hear a litany of statistics about the game delivered by the commentators, provided by a data company like Perform or Dimension Data, who in turn also provide those same data to betting companies, and which are also in a partnership with the league. It is these same data that will inform a fantasy league competition, which also sponsors the league. It might be the case that among the members of the family watching the game at home there are minors who cannot legally gamble for money, for whom a social gaming alternative is also available that can smooth the transition towards real money gambling in the future.

Also, for some demographic groups, sports betting might not be as appealing as eSports, but sport teams have already started sponsoring players in those competitions. When the match has finished, fans can watch further gambling commercials such as ones related to poker, conveniently introduced by sportsmen such as Neymar, Rafael Nadal or Cristiano Ronaldo, or indulge themselves in a little trading in the forex market company Xtrade endorsed by Cristiano Ronaldo himself.

A potential downside of such convergence might be the errors derived by a faulty identification of each product’s category and characteristics. The border between not-for-real-money social gaming on sports and real money gambling might not be obvious, especially when gambling gradually approaches gaming with more gamification attributes being added to the betting experience, and simultaneously, gaming approaches gambling by implementing real or virtual money in-app micro purchases or simulating gambling environments. Blurred lines might impact the understanding of what is information and what is promotion, as has been observed with children having problems distinguishing gambling advertising from non-advertising content (as demonstrated by Helena Sandberg and her colleagues in a 2011 issue of the International Journal of Communication). Another downside could be the transference of positive attributes from sport to other markets (most notably financial trading or poker in the example above), that buy their way into the mental association by, for instance, becoming a named sponsor of a sporting competition.

However, neither the situational and structural characteristics nor the cross-marketing convergence act as singular factors determining online betting behaviour. More likely, they work by aggregation, populating a marketing and advertising ecosystem that far from curtailing other gambling motivating factors – individual factors such as the biological, psychological or social characteristics of the gambler – it facilitates them.

(Please not that this article was co-written with Dr. Hibai Lopez-Gonzalez).

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Deans, E.G., Thomas, S.L,. Derevensky, J. & Daube, M. (2017) The influence of marketing on the sports betting attitudes and consumption behaviours of young men: implications for harm reduction and prevention strategies. Harm Reduction Journal, 14(5). doi:10.1186/s12954-017-0131-8.

Deans, E.G., Thomas, S.L,. Daube, M. & Derevensky J (2016) The role of peer influences on the normalisation of sports wagering: a qualitative study of Australian men. Addiction Research & Theory. doi: 10.1080/16066359.2016.1205042.

Gainsbury, S.M., Delfabbro, P., King, D.L., et al. (2016) An exploratory study of gambling operators’ use of social media and the latent messages conveyed. Journal of Gambling Studies, 32, 125–141.

Gordon, R. & Chapman, M. (2014). Brand community and sports betting in Australia. Victoria, Australia: Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation.

Hing, N. (2014). Sports betting and advertising (AGRC Discussion Paper No. 4). Melbourne: Australian Gambling Research Centre.

Hing, N., Lamont, M., Vitartas, P., et al. (2015). Sports-embedded gambling promotions: A study of exposure, sports betting intention and problem gambling amongst adults. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 13(1), 115–135..

Lopez-Gonzalez, H., Estevez, A. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Marketing and advertising online sports betting: A problem gambling perspective. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Is European online gambling regulation adequately addressing in-play betting advertising? Gaming Law Review and Economics, 20, 495-503.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H., Estevez, A. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Marketing and advertising online sports betting: A problem gambling perspective. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 41, 256-272.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H., Estévez, A. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Controlling the illusion of control: A grounded theory of sports betting advertising in the UK. International Gambling Studies, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Betting, forex trading, and fantasy gaming sponsorships – A responsible marketing inquiry into the ‘gamblification’ of English football. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). Understanding the convergence of online sports betting markets. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H., Guerrero-Sole, F. & Griffiths, M.D. (2017). A content analysis of how ‘normal’ sports betting behaviour is represented in gambling advertising. Addiction Research and Theory, in press.

Lopez-Gonzalez, H. & Tulloch, C.D. (2015) Enhancing media sport consumption: Online gambling in European football. Media International Australia, 155, 130–139.

Sandberg, H., Gidlof, K. & Holmberg, N. (2011). Children’s exposure to and perceptions of online advertising. International Journal of Communication, 5, 21–50.

Sticking points: A brief look at ‘the Panini sticker craze’ and its relationship with gamification

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have written a few blogs on the psychology of collecting as an addiction in addition to specific types of obsessive collecting such as record collecting. Over the last two weeks I have twice been asked to appear on radio shows talking about the ‘Panini sticker collecting craze’ that is allegedly sweeping across the UK in the run up to the start of the World Cup. My son is avidly collecting Panini stickers and yesterday I showed him my own Panini sticker books that I have kept since filling them in during the 1978 to 1980 period.

Like my youngest son now, I remember spending every last penny of my 10-pence a week pocket money buying packet after packet of stickers trying to complete my collection. One of the reasons I may have been asked to appear on radio shows was that there was an article in last week’s issue of The Guardian newspaper about the adults who are getting “misty-eyed” about Panini stickers. Ian Shoesmith, 38-year-old author of The Guardian piece and father of a four-year old son, claimed he was collecting the latest stickers:

“I rip the packets of stickers open with all the excitement and anticipation of the 10-year-old boy that I used to be, and inhale their long-forgotten but oh-so-familiar odour of glue mixed with sticky tape and paper…But my childhood passion – the thrill of racing to the paper shop, handing over all of my pocket money, desperate to be greeted by the mulleted head of a Soviet-bloc defender – is dismissed, out-of-hand, by my son. But I will persist in collecting them – for when he changes his mind. I’m most definitely not collecting them for myself. Definitely not”.

Shoesmith claimed in his article there are countless adults in the UK doing the same thing as him and had interviewed a number of people for the article. (In fact I read a statistic claiming that up to 15% of all children’s toys are bought by adults for themselves rather than their children). One thing I can appreciate is Shoesmith’s view that “it’s easier to hide adult nostalgia when you have a child who is genuinely interested in the stickers”. This definitely holds true in my household. One of the people interviewed for The Guardian article was 48-year old Mark Jensen (editor of a Newcastle United fanzine) and father to a 10-year-old son. He noted:

“For about four years [my son] would [collect] them all the time – the cards as well as the stickers…They were even banned at his school because of all of the arguments they caused. Some kids turned out to be far shrewder investors than others and rip other kids off by swapping the shiny stickers for normal ones and stuff like that…I do remember when I was a kid that there was a conspiracy story that some stickers were impossible to collect – there must be zillions of almost-completed albums out there. Nowadays I’ve heard of ‘virtual stickers’ but they are the antithesis to collecting in my view – you need the physical experience of opening the packet, all of your mates crowding round you to see what you’ve got”.

I agree fully with many of Shoesmith’s observations. I almost live vicariously through my 12-year old son opening his packets of World Cup football stickers. I love seeing his face light up when he gets a sticker that he really wants. I love seeing the anticipation of opening as I can remember those feelings myself, even though they were 35 years ago. I clearly remember going into school with a pile of ‘swapsies’ hoping that I could find the rarities needed to complete each double page. I loved it when I completed a line of three or four players, a page of players, a double page of players. It was like a bingo player filling up lines of numbers and then getting the full house (i.e., a completed page).

I never managed to complete a single football sticker book when I was a tweenager and there were always certain stickers that were seen as rarities (although got very close to a complete a Panini book in 1978). I loved the physicality of the books and stickers (and am no different now with my record and CD collecting – I always prefer CD and vinyl over MP3s). Shoesmith interviewed some academics for his article. Professor Carol Mavor (Manchester University) said that:

“Stickers are very tactile and old-fashioned. The humanity of touch is also very powerful. That’s why people love wooden toys, for example, because they have a unique feel, smell and are real. Adults don’t want to let go of their childhood completely…It seems, without being overly morbid, to be so far away from death, work and the other obligations of adulthood. As adults, we think of ourselves as different people from our childhood selves – the whole world was open to us and it was a free and more creative life.”

According to psychologist Felix Economakis (also interviewed by Shoesmith), there are likely to be gender differences and sentimentality:

“It’s down to sentimental attachment. Little objects from childhood are imbued with meaning because they remind us of people who may no longer be with us – it’s an association with the past through rose-tinted spectacles…Men are more into lists, while women tend to collect something with sentimental value. For men, partly it’s about status, and collecting for the sake of it. [Collecting is] quite a solitary activity”.

I also came across an interesting article written by P.M. Davies on the Design Thinkers website that related the collecting of football stickers to gamification. In the opening paragraph, he talked of being “addicted” to collecting them (although I’m sure he meant in a somewhat pejorative sense). He wrote that:

“If you grew up in the UK you may remember Panini sticker albums that encouraged kids to collect stickers of their favourite soccer players…As you collected you filled up your album and traded cards with your friends in the struggle to complete the full album. Every week when I got my pocket money I went down to the newsagent to buy packets of stickers in the hope I would get that rare one that had so far eluded me. I wasn’t alone as thousands of kids did the same. The strange thing was I didn’t even like soccer! I never have liked soccer and loathed watching games or even talking about it – and yet I was addicted to collecting the stickers. This is a great example of how strong the power of collecting is for us. For me it overruled the fact that I had no interest (and in fact quite a dislike) for the subject matter and got me obsessed with completing my set. I also collected novelty erasers but this was a more freeform collection and it didn’t awaken quite the same obsession as the soccer stickers. In fact the mechanisms set-up by Panini, and other similar companies, were very clever indeed and it is these techniques that are being used more in gamification projects”.

Davies notes (as I have done in my previous blogs) there are many articles that have been written on the psychology of collecting. Davies claims most of these writings are on what he calls ‘freeform collecting’ (“the urge to collect things like erasers, marbles, clocks, cars, hats, teddy bears, postcards and so on”). Davies says these are freeform because there is no limit to the collection. He argues that it is the more “structured form of collecting” (such as collecting football stickers) are related to gamification (i.e., the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems) because it involves a number of key features (my emboldened emphasis):

• “There is an achievable goal that is being moved towards (e.g. completing the entire sticker album);
• You can see what your current progress is towards that goal (e.g. the filled versus blank spaces in your sticker album);
• The scarcity effect is used (e.g. some stickers are harder to find than others);
• Status (e.g. the status of your collection effects your own status amongst your peers);
• Group identification (e.g. getting a sense of solidarity with other collectors

Davies claims these five features these form a very powerful motivational system and can be (and are) used in commercial situations (such as the awarding of badges as virtual rewards). There are debates as to whether such reward systems actually work (as the rewards have no value whatsoever in the real world). But as Davies noted:

“Research has been carried out which shows that the fun and interest in striving towards a goal is often the primary reward (Ariely & Norton, 2009). Therefore as long as badges are the embodiment of going through a good experience it becomes a symbol and not a reward in itself. Most of the controversy at the moment is actually a criticism of organisations who are applying the badge system incorrectly rather than claims that the psychology behind it is flawed”.

Looking at my own collecting behaviour, I can honestly say that the striving towards a goal can indeed be rewarding, but for me the actual acquisition of the item being collected brings about the biggest reward.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Ariely, D., & Norton, M. I. (2009). Conceptual consumption. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 475-499.

Belk, R. W. (1995). Collecting as luxury consumption: Effects on individuals and households. Journal of Economic Psychology, 16(3), 477-490.

Belk, R.W., Wallendorf, M., Sherry, J.F., & Holbrook, M.B. (1991). Collecting in a consumer culture. In: Highways and buyways: Naturalistic research from the consumer behavior odyssey, pp.178-215.

Davies, P.M. (2012). Collecting. Design Thinkers, February 13. Located at: http://www.design-thinkers.co.uk/collecting/

Formanek, R. (1991). Why they collect: Collectors reveal their motivations. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6(6), 275-286.

Shoesmith, I. (2014). The adults who get misty-eyed over Panini World Cup stickers. BBC Online News Magazine, May 6. Located at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27051215

Wikipedia (2014). Gamification. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification