Topic: The old celebrity phenomenon (Read 23 times)

In Greece where I stay there's two sides of the coin for the gambling industry.

There's the nationally licensed online casinos. Owned by big offshore gambling corporations that had bid on the handful of licenses that were sold by the Greek state in 2021. Not only are these casinos owned by very rich corporations, but the licensing scheme allows them to have an oligopoly. They're the only ones who can have ads anywhere and the state protects this kind of scheme. So long story short, they don't really need to resort to any weird marketing to attract gamblers because they're allowed to make mainstream ads. And their operation is guaranteed to be profitable anyway since they run an oligopoly and there's huge demand.

But pretty much everyone else has to resort to weird promotion tactics. It's not explicitly allowed to target the local population with gambling ads and promotion, but so long as you're a worker and not the owner the authorities won't bother you. So some offshore shell corporations are trying to promote unlicensed casinos now. And how do they market these?

One big trick they've been using is bringing back celebrities that had fallen off the spotlight. For instance, hiring old rappers that don't got it anymore with music, to just sit down every day and make rolls on online slots for 2 hours a day. There's several such streams running 24/7. People tune in to this the same way our grandparents would tune in for their favorite radio or TV show. It's so odd to observe this.

The results are obviously rigged to make them look like they're winning all the time. But watching someone play slots and have a good time is surely enjoyable. Also through many of the celebrity's fans tuning in the program, the casinos surely get more traffic and make more and more people hooked to their platform and gambling every day.

Has this been happening in your country as well? Do you see casinos hiring odd celebrities and influencers to become regular streamers for their platform?