October 16, 2025
Recently, the ASA upheld a complaint made about William Hill in respect of a promotional voucher the complainant received from a gaming machine in a betting shop.
The complainant received the voucher, issued by the machine at 11:51 AM on 3 April 2025, which stated: “You’ve won a £5 cash match on any game!” and “Redeemable between 03/04/2025 – 03/04/2025 from 05:20 PM – 11:59 PM in any venue”.
As such, in order to enjoy the benefit of the voucher the customer would have had to place a bet in any William Hill shop later that day. Ultimately, the key consideration for the ASA was whether by requiring the customer to do that, William Hill’s promotion was “encouraging excessive consumption or irresponsible use”, thereby breaching the CAP Code.
The ASA concluded that the promotion was encouraging irresponsible behaviour, citing a breach of Rule 8.5 (Protection of consumers, safety and suitability), and ordered that the ad must not appear again in the form complained of. Moreover, William Hill was told to ensure that future promotions did not encourage “irresponsible use”. Disappointingly, the ASA offered no guidance, at all, about what it thinks that means.
The ASA’s stance
Section 8 of the CAP Code regulates the nature and administration of promotions and applies to all promotional marketing communications, and therefore to any gambling promotions. It is important to note this ASA intervention did not cite Section 16 of the CAP Code, which deals specifically with gambling advertising.
Rather, this related to the general promotional Rule 8.5, which states that:
“Promotions must not be socially undesirable to the audience addressed by encouraging excessive consumption or irresponsible use”.
The ASA stated: “the timeframe between when the voucher was issued and when it was redeemable created an incentive for repeated play within a short period, including visiting the betting shop twice in a single day, increasing the risk of consumers gambling more than they otherwise would”.
The advertising regulator, therefore, “considered that linking the reward to a same-day timeframe, particularly at a limited period later on the day, incentivised behaviours that could encourage irresponsible use”.
The Operator’s stance
William Hill made a number of points to rebut this:
- The amount needed to qualify for the voucher was not substantial and did not encourage excessive staking, explaining that the £50 stake was comprised of the customer’s original cash-in and any winnings subsequently played.
- The voucher was a ‘low-value, one-off reward’ that was not part of any wider incentive structure.
- The redemption of the £5 voucher, which was issued to customers who had staked £50 or more on an eligible gaming machine on the day of the promotion, was optional and there was no requirement to spend further. They supported this submission by demonstrating that the majority of qualifying customers did not redeem the voucher.
They also demonstrated that very few customers who redeemed the voucher did so within a period of two hours or less. This indicated that most customers had left the shop and returned later, suggesting that the redemption window did not pressure customers to remain in the shop or extend their play.
Our analysis
In line with consumer law, a trader’s commercial practice (here the promotion of a product), should not use techniques that mislead or (most relevant here) pressure a consumer such that they are likely to take a different transactional decision. The ASA will also have regard to wider, relevant legislation (in the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA)) whenever it considers complaints that a marketing communication is aggressive, misleading or unfair to consumers.
Observers are left to answer the key question; namely, did the structure of this promotion unduly influence the consumer such that they engaged with it “irresponsibly”?
There is little guidance as to what “irresponsible use” includes, which clearly the ASA believes gives it a wide scope as to what is or is not irresponsible. There have been examples relating to alcohol promotions where claims or imagery which directly condone or encourage excessive consumption of alcohol have been considered to breach rule 8.5. However, these have involved promotions that offered a group of 15 people 12+ units of alcohol in one sitting, or where the chance of winning a prize was increased by consuming multiple drinks.
In this William Hill example, however, the ASA focused on the timeframe for redemption, suggesting that this is a more important factor than the amount of money involved (and, as is the case here, even if very few customers go on to redeem the promotional voucher).
For the gambling compliance community, this begs the question “how short a timeframe for redemption is too short”? Or, put another way, is a promotion that incentivises someone to gamble more than once a day inherently problematic?
Whilst the ASA has sometimes been able to make reference to the UK Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines in relation to ‘safe-drinking’ limits, no similar reference has been made to the Gambling Commission’s responsible gambling regulatory framework and how that is required to be implemented. And whilst operators are required to identify and act on a variety of markers of harm (including frequency and time spent gambling), this broader and far more sophisticated regulation that is designed to address what might loosely, for present purposes, be described as compulsive / excessive behaviours is nowhere to be seen. It is as if the ASA has no visibility of gambling regulation as all, which is far more developed to be able to determine what is excessive and/or irresponsible behaviour in a betting shop. This clearly demonstrates the difficulty we have with the conclusion the ASA has reached which, it seems, is based solely on the ASA’s view of gambling behaviour.
Whilst the ASA must always look at the advertising ‘as a whole’, this adjudication is underpinned with a conclusion that a gaming machine customer who is incentivised to return to a shop later in the day to place a free bet is being “encouraged to act in an excessive and irresponsible way”.
As the frontline advertising regulator, the ASA must consider all the relevant rules (including the DMCCA requirements around, for example, the protection of consumers from being misled by advertising), but it does seem that this ruling can only be ‘in remit’ if what is being put forward is that this promotion really did pressurise customers to act in “an excessive and irresponsible way”. And, yet the ASA gives no guidance on what that actually means, nor does it consider all of the relevant rules when considering gambling regulation.
And so, we are left to lament about an opaque and poorly reasoned decision made by a regulator with no locus to determine what constitutes ‘excessive’ and/or ‘irresponsible’ gambling behaviour, let alone the relevant skills or experience.
In our view, this is a highly unsatisfactory position. The industry has taken huge strides in the last few years to identify developing harms in real-time, presided over by the complex and ever-evolving SRCP 3.4.3., stewarded by the gambling regulator.
So, to have the advertising regulator completely ignore that and publish their conclusion “that linking the reward to a same-day timeframe, particularly at a limited period later on the day, incentivised behaviours that could encourage irresponsible use”, is one of the most startling examples of regulatory overreach we have seen for some time.
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