This Ruling forms part of a wider piece of work banning gambling ads which, under strengthened rules, are prohibited from being likely to be of strong appeal to under-18s.

The ad was identified for investigation following intelligence gathered by our Active Ad Monitoring system, which uses AI to proactively search for online ads that might break the rules.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) investigated whether the ad breached rules for including an individual likely to be of strong appeal to under-18s.

Hillside (UK Sports) ENC t/a bet365 said the tweet was published using the Twitter Amplify feature as part of bet365’s official sponsorship integration with Sky Sports Premier League. They said Amplify was a feature on Twitter that placed advertisers’ adverts before the main video content of the tweet. They said the main video content and the main text of the tweet was produced by the publisher, which in this case was Sky Sports Premier League.

Bet365 said it was designed to replicate the broadcasting of ads ahead of sport content on television and that for this ad, they had acquired the rights for their ads to appear on a pre-roll video ahead of the Sky Sports Premier League content in the tweet. Due to that, the content in the body of the tweet and the main video was produced by Sky Sports and therefore the tweet and video content from Sky Sports was separate to the bet365 part of the tweet.

The ASA considered that it would have been acceptable for the ad to appear in a medium where under-18s, for all intents and purposes, could be entirely excluded from the audience. That would apply in circumstances where those who saw the ad had been robustly age-verified as being 18 or older, such as through marketing lists that had been validated by payment data or credit checking. Because Twitter was a media environment where users self-identified on customer sign-up, and did not use robust age-verification, we considered that bet365 had not excluded under-18s from the audience with the highest level of accuracy required for ads the content of which was likely to appeal to under-18s.

For those reasons, we concluded that the ad was irresponsible.