Episode #2 - UK's Ad Crackdown, Italy's Content Rules, a New Casino Austria CEO

This article covers the regulatory roundup from episode 2 of Legacy Makers, the weekly iGaming brief from the Legacy Builders Podcast, where our founder Laurent Zachar joined the show again to discuss industry news. This piece covers a UK study on gambling ad exposure among 18 to 24 year olds, Italy’s proposed rules for gambling-linked sports content, and what a new CEO appointment at Casino Austria signals for the wider industry. The full episode is embedded below.

• What the UK’s gambling ad study found
• What operators should check before advertising
• Italy’s push to separate sports news from gambling content
• A regulatory-minded CEO takes over at Casino Austria
• FAQ

What the UK’s gambling ad study found

UK rules bar gambling operators from advertising to people aged 18 to 24, even though the legal betting age in parts of the UK can be as young as 18. A recent study found that rule is being broken at scale. Laurent’s reaction:

You’re not allowed in the UK to advertise for people who are between 18 and 24 years old, for iGaming, for gambling, betting. Whenever you have advertising targeting Instagram, Google Ads, you should be excluding this age group. But what the UK study found is that there were still billions of ad impressions where people were still seeing ads, even though they were much younger.

His read on why the rule exists at all: younger bettors are more likely to chase losses and bet beyond their means, which is exactly the group regulators are trying to shield from exposure.

What operators should check before advertising

Laurent’s advice for operators running ad campaigns in regulated markets was direct:

You need to consider how old your target audience is, and you need to make sure that people outside that target audience aren’t seeing your ads. I would highly recommend this because then you end up getting a fine. The market is big enough. You don’t have to go ahead and make some black hat, dirty tricks. Stay within the regulation.

Age-exclusion settings on ad platforms exist specifically for this. Skipping them to widen reach is a short-term gain that risks a fine large enough to erase it.

Italy’s push to separate sports news from gambling content

Italy is working through a consultation on where sports journalism ends and gambling promotion begins, a line that’s gotten blurrier as prediction markets and sports betting content have converged. Laurent explained the goal:

Italy right now is trying to do something to improve the clarity in the markets. They want to understand what is sports news and what is infotainment. There’s a consultation right now, trying to understand how we can separate what is sports sponsoring and gambling advertising. This is also where prediction markets are coming into it.

For operators doing content marketing in Italy, the practical takeaway is caution rather than aggression:

It means you have to be super careful, because one word could actually trigger a compliance review and get you in trouble. You need to be very careful when you’re doing marketing, if you want to keep your license.

A regulatory-minded CEO takes over at Casino Austria

Casino Austria appointed Andreas Wehrwirth, a lottery-industry veteran with a legal and regulatory background, as its new CEO ahead of the country’s gambling license tender process. Laurent read the appointment as a signal about where the company, and the broader Austrian market, is heading:

Andreas is a very legal guy. He has been working in the lottery business. Austria is getting more and more regulated. They needed someone who knows how to talk to regulators as a CEO. It’s both a regulatory move and a very strong business decision.

Asked what smaller operators should take from a large, decades-old operator restructuring around regulatory readiness, his advice was to stay out of that lane entirely:

If you’re a small operator, you should not even pay attention to it. You should focus on smaller markets. The world is big enough, and you have tons of countries where you’re going to be able to make a lot of money in countries where you don’t need a license. We’re talking about big boys who’ve been in business for 30 years. I would not recommend anyone go into this direction yet, unless they’ve been in the casino business for decades already.

For an operator weighing which jurisdiction to target first, our how to launch a white label casino guide covers how to pick a market that fits a brand’s current size, rather than one built for a 30-year incumbent.

FAQ

What did the UK’s gambling ad study find?

That despite rules barring gambling ads from targeting 18 to 24 year olds, a large volume of ad impressions, in the billions according to Laurent’s account of the study, were still reaching that age group across platforms like Instagram and Google Ads.

What should operators check before running ads in a regulated market?

Age-exclusion and audience targeting settings on every ad platform they use, confirmed against the specific age groups their license prohibits targeting. Fines for violating ad rules can be severe enough to outweigh any reach gained from skipping this step.

What is Italy proposing for gambling-linked sports content?

A clearer regulatory line between sports journalism and gambling promotion, worked out through an active consultation process, partly in response to how prediction markets have blurred that line further.

Why does Casino Austria’s new CEO appointment matter industry-wide?

Because it signals Austria’s gambling market is tightening further, and that an established operator sees a compliance-focused, legally trained executive as the right profile to navigate that shift, rather than a pure business operator.

Where can I watch the full episode?

The complete episode is embedded above, and also available on YouTube directly. It’s the second episode of Legacy Makers, the weekly iGaming news segment on the Legacy Builders Podcast channel, the same show behind our founder’s original two-part interview.