Stop Predatory Gambling
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Watch how the most predatory business in America brands itself to deflect public scrutiny
by Les
State lotteries spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising every year. While much of that spending is intended to get citizens to lose even more money buying virtually worthless lottery tickets, lotteries also run aggressive ad campaigns with the specific intent to improve their public image to the majority of the population who rarely use the lottery. Without these ads, many more citizens and members of the media would be challenging the lotteries as one of the biggest public policy failures in the last fifty years.
Few lotteries are more relentless in their “branding” campaign than the Georgia Lottery. Why? The revenue for the Georgia Hope Scholarship program continues to dry up as lottery sales struggle and now the lottery is part of a drive to legalize slot machines (i.e. “VLTs.”) The TV ad below is the latest example of the Georgia Lottery’s effort to willfully distort the public’s perception of what it does and its effectiveness. They get away with using children in lottery ads because state lotteries are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws. Serious gambling-related problems has emerged as an epidemic among America’s youth in large part because of the predatory marketing used by casinos and lotteries, all of which is sponsored by our government.
Georgia lottery
It’s embarrassing these ads are from my state. The lottery retailer in my neighborhood agrees the lottery is predatory but she says if she stops selling she will lose customer traffic to the convenience store down the street. They should just say we’re going to phase the lottery out of business over five years and get on with it.
Slot Machines
You aint seen nothing until you come to Australia and see the harm the proliferation of slots [pokies] as we call them in Australia. Please see my comments for the February 4th entry under the blog- slots and video poker machines. You now have a multi millionaire John Singleton launching a $20 million campaign against our federal government’s push to restrict gambling on the slots.