Euro football is halfway through, and the overdose is already there. Sports betting companies have been saturating the media space for weeks, bludgeoning pre-match spots, sponsoring sports broadcasts, multiplying partnerships with influencers on social networks… The sector’s advertising budgets have increased by 26% since then 2019. To the point of seriously irritating those who, until then, were the main and passive target of their campaigns, the young people of the neighborhoods, more and more aware of being targeted, then drained by bookmakers.
“Community targeting, as evidenced by the semantic scope of their campaigns, is deliberate, structured. They target precarious players in relegated areas. »Marwan Muhammad, statistician and activist
Host, among others, on Clique TV with Mouloud Achour, Sébastien Abdelhamid, 221,000 followers on Twitter, was one of the first to denounce the risks of addiction favored by this “Marketing of misery”. “The aesthetics, the codes, the figures that carry them are supposed to address the suburbs, and we must recognize that it is very well done”, he concedes.
You just have to get off in the metro or turn on the TV to be convinced: the Betclic campaign (“Rocking in the game”, with the comedian Thomas NGijol and the rappers Fianso and Dinos, or the hashtag #Betclickhalass, – khalass means “pay” in Maghreb Arabic), that of Winamax (“Everything for the daronne”, the punchline of Marseillais Mohamed Henni…), those of Parions sport (from the FDJ group, which features families and young people mainly black and Arab) and Unibet (“Bascule en mode Euro”, with PSG players Neymar, Mbappé , Marquinhos, Cavani and Kimpembe) ostensibly target suburban youth.
If she “Notes the advertising hype”, the spokesperson for the National Gaming Authority (ANJ), an independent regulatory body, strangely believes that“None of these advertisements fall within the scope of the law”, even if they violate all or almost all the various provisions provided for by the decree of November 4, 2020 relating to the modalities of regulation of the National Gaming Authority …
Faced with this surge, Marwan Muhammad, statistician and activist, former director of the Collective against Islamophobia in France, an association which has since been dissolved by the government, has posted a series of tweets in recent days to alert players. “Community targeting, as evidenced by the semantic scope of their campaigns, is deliberate, structured. They target precarious players in relegated areas ”, judge the one who, when he was a student in financial mathematics, had devoted his final thesis to probabilities.
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