A year of AI slop, inflated metrics and tax rises mean iGaming marketeers must pivot back towards a human touch, argues IMS founder Alex Vass.
The iGaming sector may have started the year with plenty of potential on the marketing front, but 2025 arguably ended up something of an annus horribilis – with November’s budget, and the subsequent impact on operators’ marketing budgets, the cherry on the cake.
As we approach 2026, what does the next 12 months have in store? My prediction is that the industry will respond and realign to two 2025-defining marketing trends: the accelerating shift away from brand towards performance marketing and the rise of AI slop.
Measuring for the long-term
There’s no one-size-fits-all rule for how gaming brands should best allocate their marketing spend, particularly when it comes to brand vs performance. Circumstances differ. But what we did see in late 2025 was a clear shift away from brand towards performance, driven by several market factors and conditions. I believe it’s a counterproductive trend that needs consideration.
The first factor in this shift was November’s budget, which saw the announcement that Remote Gaming Duty will increase from 21% to 40%, and General Betting Duty up from 15% to 25%. We have personally seen at IMS that many of our iGaming clients are tightening their marketing belts in response, cutting investment in brand in particular.
The second driving force is metrics. Google’s and Meta’s are notoriously flawed and inflate their own performance metrics, discrediting the true value of brand. If a customer searches for an operator and clicks on their website, Google will fully attribute that conversion to their search platform. This, of course, misses out all the little brand steps along the way, such as TV advertising or OOH, that may have driven that customer to search for the operator in the first place. It leads brands to misallocate budget too heavily towards performance.
There are two key points here. The first is that our research and data shows that investment in brand offers iGaming companies a better long-term ROI than investment in performance. Thus, companies would be wise not to lurch and instinctively cut brand spend in 2026, no matter how tempting it may be to prioritise short-term results.
The second is that traditional performance marketing metrics misattribute success, including the relationship between brand investment and short-term investments in performance marketing. Our data shows in no sector is this more obvious than in iGaming.
Countering slop
GenAI’s rise in 2025 poses a dilemma for gaming brands heading into 2026. On one hand, GenAI has undoubtedly enabled gaming companies to enhance marketing assets, game development and player experiences in new and exciting ways.
But with the growth in AI slop – low quality, mass-produced, homogenous content – consumers are increasingly turning back in favour of “authentic”, high-quality work. Research from social agency Billion Dollar Boy, for example, found that 74% of people prefer manmade, “human” creativity over content created by AI, compared to 40% in 2023.
Why? Because AI slop makes brands feel cheap. Brands that rely on this sort of content might think that they are being innovative, but often it comes back to bite them. Slop leads to distrust, and poor-quality creatives get lost in a crowd of similarly low-quality content.
We saw this in the summer with betting platform Kalshi’s $2,000 AI-generated NBA finals advert. Whilst it was commended for its innovative approach on a shoestring budget, it was also widely criticised for being inhuman and impersonal, and led some audiences to say they subsequently distrusted the brand.
I believe that brands that win over audiences in 2026 will revert to pre-GenAI emotionally intelligent creatives which feel unmistakably human. Take Paddy Power’s recent social media campaigns as an example: they’re high-quality, humorous, human, and memorable, building brand as well as driving sales, and audiences love them.
Demand for unique, relatable content is likely to keep on growing in 2026. It will be interesting to see which brands follow suit, and which get lost in the AI crowd.
In 2026, iGaming companies may start to question the true value of apparently innovative AI content and return to a more human-focused type of advertising. At the same time, if brands embrace more complex, intelligent measurement models, (including independent analytics, marketing mix modelling and econometrics) we may also see a rebalancing of priorities away from performance and towards brand. 2026 may well be the year when businesses wake up to the fact that strong, creative, human-led marketing content drives far more sales in the long run.
