In a few more years, the online gambling industry will be turning two decades old. Viewed in human terms, the industry would, at present, still be considered an adolescent — approaching maturity, but not quite there yet. Its energies and capabilities increase with every new day, yet in terms of ‘progress,’ much of our industry remains frozen in place, like a lumbering brontosaurus that stumbled into a tar pool, unable to extricate its feet, slowly sinking lower and lower. It’s time we, as an industry, admit we have a problem before our heads are completely submerged in filth.
If a psychologist were to analyze the online gambling industry by the majority of its marketing campaigns, that psychologist would assume the industry was entirely populated by 14-year-old boys. Like most adolescents, these ‘players’ in the online gambling industry espouse a worldview consisting of binge drinking, off-color humor and scantily clad women. This insistent focus on the cheap and the tawdry negatively affects online gambling’s chances of breaking through on a mainstream, respectable cultural level.
Market research conducted by Ipsos in 2010 informs us that there’s a vast untapped audience of potential gamblers out there who are turned off by images of women in bikinis and stiletto heels– honestly, when was the last time you saw a woman dressed that way outside of a strip club — and therefore decide they want nothing to do with our apparently sordid industry. Is this really the image we want to project? Many of us who have young daughters have been faced with awkward questions about why the company Daddy works for relies so heavily on this sort of smut. Would we want leering gamblers ogling our daughters in this fashion? Of course not. But every one of those girls in bikinis and heels is someone’s daughter. They deserve better.
We feel that it’s time for this industry to grow up, to act like men, not sniggering little boys. We intend to lead by example in addressing this arrested development. There’ll be no more ‘Ayre Heads’ (a hideously derogatory term) on this site. If it’s bare flesh you seek, try a strip club. We say, get your mind out of the gutter and get back in the game. Who’s with us?
