Antigambling Campaign Fail: Advert against Gambling Becomes the Best Pro-Betting Vid Ever

Campaigns against gambling are in general a good thing. Raising awareness about gambling related problems is no small matter and, overall, it certainly helps the community. However, even a serious cause such as this can unintentionally become a fail and produce an opposite effect.

This is exactly what happened with Singapore’s National Council on Problem Gambling’s advert that’s been floating on Youtube for past couple days and has reached over a million views. For an antigambling campaign, this would be a great success - but a reason for the interest is not a suddenly awaken global consciousness on evils stemming from gambling.

The 30-second video shows a group of young boys talking about the World Cup and what teams they would like to see win the whole thing. One of them acts all sad and says that he is rooting for Germany because his dad put all of his savings on them. Now let’s go over that one more time, slowly. His dad put all of the savings on – Germany!

Before the World Cup started, most bookies were giving between 5.5 – 6.0 / 1 odds on Germany to win. So, provided the bet of $10,000 – 20,000, it would net the profit of anywhere between $40,000 - $100,000, which is like really a lot of money in Singapore.

It is understandable that creators of the ad did not really bother checking with how likely their pick was to actually win, but they probably shouldn't have gone with a team that was easily in the top three to make the finals. Going with a weaker team would actually be along the lines of the message they wanted to get across – betting big against the odds, trying to make a lot of money on a bet that is highly unlikely to come through (for example, Nigeria was about 150 / 1 to win).

Instead they went with Germany, a team that pretty much ran over their competition, humiliated a great Brazil 7 : 1 in semis and went on to win the finals against Argentina. With all that, what was intended as an honest to God antigambling campaign turned into an advert for sports betting. All you would need to do is add extra couple seconds, a kid happily smiling in his new house and any online betting site logo and voila. Add something like “we make dreams come true (with help of German National Team)” and you actually have a very solid commercial.

Comments on the video are, of course, hilarious as well, ranging from “winner, winner chicken dinner”, “guess who’s going to university” to “moral of this video, stop gambling but you will regret it”. Only few people in the bunch tried to reiterate the dangers of gambling, but those voices were quickly lost.

The organization tried to save their face, publishing the bellow picture and linking it in the video description. They were probably not in a mood to make another video so the picture should be a “quick fix”. At least this time they did not try to predict any teams, which is probably a good idea, as I can see a lot of people out there following their anti-tips just for the heck of it.