In September, the American Gaming Association (AGA) announced a new way to measure whether a responsible gaming (RG) campaign is working, and how well. Launched during Responsible Gaming Education Month, the Responsible Gaming Intervention Effectiveness Scale (RG-IES) aims to ensure RG messages speak to their intended audience.
The “first-of-its-kind, free-to-use” tool developed by Drs. Jonathan Ross Gilbert and Marla Royne Stafford offers academics, industry, and other “stakeholders” a research-based way to evaluate RG messaging.
With the announcement, the AGA said encouraging responsible play is a “core value” of US gaming and part of its mission. It added that the new scale—developed with assistance from Bally’s, FanDuel, and BetMGM—offers an “important starting point” for evaluating which messages resonate most.
Bonus spoke with the AGA’s Dave Forman, Stafford, and Gilbert about the new scale.
Forman, AGA’s VP of research, told Bonus that the scale is a “first step” in deciphering which messages land and which miss their targets.
Our hope is people can use this scale to test or get a sense of the effectiveness of their RG messages.
In this case, effectiveness doesn’t necessarily mean an RG message causes someone to play less, Forman noted. Rather, it means players notice and heed the messages conveyed. Forman said that tailoring RG messaging to players hasn’t really been done before. And, a lot of what’s out there, like embedding the national problem gambling hotline in ads, is legally mandated.
Development of the scale is an attempt to go further, Forman added.
Trying to get beyond that and speak to consumers in a compelling way is really the driving factor.
Compliance-Based RG Messaging Offers Bare Minimum
Drs. Gilbert and Stafford created the RG-IES after they noticed a conspicuous gap in marketing and advertising-related gambling research. Overwhelmingly, gambling studies tend to come from clinical psychology and public health disciplines. As marketing scholars, the pair found the absence of research glaring.
Stafford, a marketing professor at the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV), told Bonus that research shows advertising affects gambling behaviors.
Further, they found most responsible gambling messages were nothing more than a line underneath those gambling ads, urging players to “Please Gamble Responsibly.” That led Gilbert, an assistant marketing professor in the James T. George School of Business at Hampton University (HU), to ask how we know responsible gambling messages even work.
Gilbert said evidence showed few operators utilize existing assessments to test messages used in traditional promotions. So, the pair set out to find out for themselves.
He said that after scanning the available literature and speaking with practitioners, it became clear the industry had room for an RG-specific tool.
Fortunately, while arguing for a gambling-focused intervention effectiveness scale at UNLV’s 18th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking, the duo connected with the AGA. Ultimately, the AGA and members Bally’s, FanDuel, and BetMGM provided the funding and access to players needed to develop the scale.
The rest, said Stafford, is history.
Testing Help RG Messages Hit the Right Notes
Thanks to their collaborators, more than 5,000 American gamblers participated in the scale’s development across three separate studies.
The RG-IES, comprised of 15 items, “ensures a reliable and valid measure of advertising effectiveness” for RG messaging. However, they note that the scale only assesses attitudes, intentions, social norms, and behaviors, not the uptake of RG tools.
Stafford said they’d eventually like to modify the scale to do that. Until then, the scale is available to help the industry ensure its RG messaging hits the right notes.
Said, Stafford:
Any company, any tribe, any casino, any one of those seeking to implement a campaign can use this to assess the most efficacious message.
Gilbert added that, ideally, they want to see the industry take a systematic approach, testing RG messages before rolling them out.
He said the process would begin by presenting a message or messages—visual, written, or both—to a test group. Those players would then rate the message(s) based on the scale. The testers could then determine if the message(s) meet the scale’s minimum standard by analyzing the results. When comparing multiple messages, the scale can assess which works best.
Gilbert noted that the test group should reflect a representative sample of the targeted consumers, particularly if they want messages to reach specific groups. This requirement is especially true in a digital setting with more control over targeting the right demographics with the most valuable messages.
That’s really important, things like gender, race, and ethnicity, and seeing if there are differences between groups so that responsible gaming messages can be tailored.”
Tool Helps Target Specific Audiences
As a professor at a historically Black college, Gilbert said he’s acutely aware of the need to target the right person with the right content at the right time on the right device. Particularly with special populations, which research suggests face disproportionate impacts of gambling harm.
Stafford said the goal when testing a message is to catch people before they reach the problem gambling stage. So, the message needs to speak to the appropriate demographic.
And that’s really, really important in creating a message for responsible gambling. It needs to be something that interests that group, or they will just tune it out. A lot of people don’t know what responsible gambling is. They equate it with problem gambling.
Used correctly, Gilbert said the RG-IES can “absolutely” do that.
Forman told Bonus that is AGA’s hope. Both in terms of how the industry uses the scale and the next steps for further research.
I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody that certain RG messages resonate better with online Sports betters than they might with land-based slot players. The same is true of other demographics, whether male versus female players, age differences, racial differences, or regional differences.
We do hope, and I suspect, people will use it to tailor those messages even more specifically to resonate with whatever group they’re focused on reaching.
Industry-Based Collab Made Scale Possible
Gilbert said he and Stafford appreciated the industry’s willingness to go beyond basic legal requirements during RG-IES development.
One of the things that I think impressed Marla and me about not just the AGA but the majority of operators is their proactive desire to push beyond what regulators are requesting and ensure the long-term sustainability of their business and profitability is based on showing real, genuine concern and protection for their consumers.
He also noted the project is an example of what can happen when stakeholders work together toward a common goal.
This was a wonderful example of what we would call community-based participatory research, the coming together of agencies, academics, and practitioners to collaboratively work together to create something that, quite frankly, could not have been created on its own. Marla and I, sitting in an ivory tower, would never have been able to accomplish this without MGM, FanDuel, Ballys, and the facilitation by AGA.
Stafford added that today, people, companies, and tribes are seriously considering how to craft messages that focus on customers and their well-being. She reiterated that the RG-IES offers an essential step toward better, more effective RG messages.
This is a chance to actually start building campaigns that can target people appropriately and keep customer bases sustainable…
Marketing is very powerful. Advertising is very powerful, and we can use it to do a lot of good.
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