Much More than a Game: The Role of Commercial Advertising in the Struggle between the Advocates and Opponents of Gambling

In many countries gambling has been progressively legalized over the past decades and has generated an ever-expanding industry able to influence state policy. The transformation of gambling into a mainstream leisure activity goes along with the ‘colonization’ of the social imaginary by images and symbols related to hazard products, which are at the same time promoted through advertisements and sold in ubiquitous and easily accessible shops. This expansion has resulted in an animated debate between the advocates and opponents of gambling. Among the former are concessionaires and trade associations, while the latter often include both lay and religious not-for-profit associations whose aim is to protect citizens from risks such as gambling addiction, usury, and racketeering. The literature, which largely adopts medical and psychological approaches, has paid relatively little attention to the role of advertising in creating a ‘landscape’ that normalizes the presence of gambling in everyday life. In this chapter I analyse a corpus of 369 commercials that appeared in Italy in two periods (2010 and 2012-2013) and were promoted by major gambling concessionaires. Relying on a socio-semiotic approach, I identify the main representations that the commercials contain and the risks related to such representations of gambling. My argument is developed against the background of analysis of Italian legal gambling as a social field where a struggle among the State, concessionaires, media, and opponents of gambling is fought. The chapter shows that commercial advertising works as a means to dampen the tone of the struggle because concessionaires accept some restrictions on communication in order to be perceived as responsible players. This (apparently) weak approach contributes to mystifying the real processes taking place in the field, especially the neoliberal transformation of the State from an agent in charge of protecting citizens into a weakened market regulator that gives ‘chances’ to consumers.