Italian Responsible Gambling Campaigns: New Rules Open a Branding Window for Licensed Operators

Italian responsible gambling campaigns now have a rulebook and might represent an opportunity for operators to show their brands in highly regulated market which requires a tailored approach.

After a consultation, the Italian communications authority (AGCOM) has published its supplementary guidelines on the interpretation of the Italian gambling advertising ban. The guidelines implement the regime introduced with the reform of the Italian remote gambling licensing regime that imposed on concessionaires an annual investment in responsible gambling communications equal to 0.2% of net revenues, capped at EUR 1 million. Below is analysis of the contents of the supplementary guidelines:

Why the Final Text Is Good News for Licensed Operators

For eight years the Italian market has operated under a near-total advertising prohibition, while brand exposure kept migrating into grey areas policed by AGCOM with fines that hit affiliates and platforms as well as media owners and commissioning parties. The supplementary guidelines do something different. They build a lawful, branded and measurable communication channel inside the ban.

Three elements deserve particular attention from a commercial standpoint:

1. The logo is expressly admitted. The use of the logo or trademark is allowed, provided the gaming product is not shown.
2. The mandatory spend becomes visibility. The 0.2% investment is a statutory obligation in any case. Operators that build a proper multi-format plan convert a cost item into the only lawful brand impression available on Italian generalist media, and the guidelines require an adequate presence on national and local television, radio and press.
3. A safeguard clause is now written into the text. Communications compliant with the supplementary guidelines and genuinely free of incentivising content cannot be treated as promotional communications prohibited by the Italian gambling advertising ban. This is the closest thing to a safe harbour that the Italian market has seen since 2018.

The counterpart is that conformity is substantive, not declaratory. AGCOM will look at content, context, form, frequency of dissemination, use of the mark and the presence of any referral to the gaming offer.

The Compliance Perimeter at a Glance

Logo Use: The Marginality Test

The logo performs an identification function, and AGCOM expressly recognises its value in distinguishing the legal offer from the illegal one, particularly in less supervised social and digital contexts. That recognition is a genuine gain for licensed operators.

The mark, however, must never be the central or most emphasised component. The indices of marginality listed by the Authority are practical and easy to build into a creative brief:

• contained dimensions compared to the textual and graphic elements of the warning;
• placement in a corner or lateral area, never in the central or opening part of the format;
• no animation, progressive enlargement or other effects increasing visibility;
• in audiovisual formats, limited exposure time relative to the overall duration of the prevention message.

Anyone drafting a media plan should treat these four indices as a checklist to be documented at storyboard stage, because they are the elements an inspector will measure after the campaign has aired.

Links and QR Codes: Four Cumulative Conditions

The “no-link” principle survives, but with a carve-out that was not obvious in the draft. Referrals to neutral informative pages are admitted, including pages hosted on sites attributable to the Italian gambling licensed operator, provided they do not carry the operator’s brand or logo and are dedicated exclusively to player protection tools. Four conditions apply cumulatively:

1. the destination page contains no promotional element and no information on gaming products, odds, bonuses or contractual conditions, and does not allow navigation towards the gaming area or the gaming account;
2. access to the page and the activation of protection tools do not entail any profiling of the user under the GDPR, nor the development of predictive logics on gambling behaviour or risk propensity;
3. any data collected in that context, for instance the activation of a spending limit or a self-exclusion period, is processed consistently with the minimisation and purpose limitation principles of the GDPR, and is not reused for direct or indirect marketing, commercial profiling, ad targeting or behavioural profile reconstruction, nor shared with third parties for incompatible purposes;
4. the functional and IT segregation between the player protection area and the rest of the site is verifiable and documentable by the concessionaire at the Authority’s request.

Fail one of them, and the referral becomes a surreptitious form of indirect promotion in breach of the Italian gambling advertising ban. The fourth condition is the one that will require engineering work rather than legal drafting, since documenting segregation to a regulator means logs, architecture diagrams and access controls, not a paragraph in a compliance policy. Privacy and marketing teams should be involved from the outset, given the explicit prohibition on reusing self-exclusion and limit-setting data.

On social networks and video sharing platforms the Authority accepts referrals to operator-managed sections free of gambling invitations, activated where the format allows through a single responsible gambling image with a dedicated link, including a link in bio or in the comments.

Targeting, Risk Markers and Automated Messaging

Segmentation is treated as one of the most sensitive application profiles. The 18-24 age band identified receives particular attention, alongside minors in the 11-13 and 14-17 bands and people over 65. AGCOM rejected the option of excluding these groups from campaigns, on the ground that exclusion would neutralise the preventive effect. Initiatives addressed to minors are channelled exclusively through educational and institutional settings.

Pre-testing of the message on the target segment before dissemination is recommended, together with retention of the segmentation criteria and media plans adopted. Operators should keep this documentation available: it is the natural evidence base in any subsequent proceeding.

The Self-Assessment Grid

The most practically useful part of the document is the conformity grid, which allows Italian gambling licensed operators, commissioning parties, media owners and event organisers, to verify a message before it goes out.

Necessary requirements (cumulative): clear and prevalent prevention content referring to concrete behaviours of immoderate gambling; recognisability as a prevention message; a comprehensible warning on risks; the minimum information elements required by the guidelines which are that the communication:

1. provides clearly and prominently features content aimed at preventing and combating gambling disorders, relating to specific instances of excessive gambling behaviour;
2. is clearly recognisable as a prevention and protection message;
3. includes, in an easily understandable form, a warning about the risks associated with an unbalanced approach to gambling;
4. contains
   • references to support services, such as the new single national helpline dedicated to all forms of addiction, whether substance-related or behavioural;
   • information on the option to activate self-exclusion measures and set limits on spending and time spent gambling, emphasising that these measures are designed to protect the player; and
   • any other information required by the relevant legislation.
5. is consistent with the themes identified in the Annual Policy Document of the Government Commission which still needs to be issued;
6. where it bears the licence holder’s logo or trademark, it uses it within the limits indicated above.

Blocking elements (any one is fatal): incentivising elements; direct or evocative reference to the gaming offer; call-to-action however formulated; graphic or narrative emphasis on the brand or gaming products.

Elements that do not trigger non-conformity: the logo within the limits indicated above; neutral or merely descriptive communications on protection tools; compliant referrals to protection pages; short formats within an integrated plan; automated messaging to account holders; references to behavioural risk markers, including in messages addressed to the general public; a tone normalising the request for help.

Context, form, frequency and placement are elements of overall assessment, with trivialisation of financial loss and representation of gambling as an ordinary moment of daily pleasure singled out as the two normalisation risks.

Prior Clearance: The Most Effective Risk Mitigation Tool

The guidelines open the door to prior engagement with the Italian Self-Regulatory Advertising Institute (Istituto di Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria – IAP) as a potential prior approval which might limit the risk of challenges. Indeed, the IAP provides a very fast prior consultation solution that grants strong arguments to support the legitimacy of the initiative, while AGCOM never provides a formal clearance.

Submitting the communication to IAP before dissemination produces three concrete benefits:

• Predictability on the borderline calls. The distinction between marginal and emphasised use of a logo, or between a neutral protection page and a surreptitious gateway, is a matter of degree. A prior opinion converts that judgement into a documented position taken before the money is spent.
• Evidence of diligence in the liability chain. The liability of commissioning parties, media owners and event organisers is assessed according to objective criteria, including the possibility for the party concerned to detect the divergence of the message from the established safeguards. A positive IAP assessment is precisely the element that shows a media owner or a commissioning party acted with the required diligence, and it is worth building the clearance into contractual warranties along the production chain.
• Correction before exposure. Amending a storyboard costs a fraction of what it costs to withdraw a national campaign, and past AGCOM practice shows that sanctions in this area hit several links of the chain simultaneously rather than the operator alone.

Prior clearance does not bind AGCOM and does not exclude a subsequent proceeding. It does, however, make the operator’s position substantially more defensible, and it is difficult to see why a concessionaire investing up to EUR 1 million a year would leave that protection on the table.

8. Action Points for Italian gambling licensed operators

Operators finalising campaigns for the coming season should focus on the following:

1. rebuild the creative brief around the criteria listed above, and record the reasoning behind each choice;
2. audit the linkable page architecture against the four cumulative conditions indicated above, with input from privacy and IT teams on segregation and profiling;
3. design the media plan as an integrated multi-format system, with short formats routing to extended content, and with the generalist media presence required by the guidelines;
4. run and document a pre-test on the target segment, retaining segmentation criteria and media plans;
5. build the grid into an internal sign-off template, with a named owner for each requirement; and
6. submit the final creative to IAP and reflect the outcome in the contracts with agencies, media owners and event organisers.

The supplementary guidelines entered into force the day after its publication on the Authority’s website, with transitional arrangements possible for campaigns already planned or contracted. Italian responsible gambling campaigns are therefore live business as of now, and the operators that treat them as a communication project rather than a compliance formality will be the ones extracting value from a budget they have to spend regardless.

On a similar topic, you can read the article “Italian Court Upholds Sanction for Gambling Advertising Ban’s Violation Through Affiliate Agreements“.  Also, you can read about the different gambling regimes in almost 50 jurisdictions in the DLA Piper Gambling Laws of the World guide.