Revealing data on the trajectory of advertising spending by the black market has heightened calls for the UK government to take action.
Projections from the marketing intelligence firm WARC suggest that by September 2026, the proportion of UK advertising spend will sit slightly over 52% in favour of the regulated market. However, the scale is set to tip in favour of the unregulated sector as soon as 2028.
£1.9bn is expected to be spent on advertising in the period between October 2025 and September 2026, with £1.05bn being contributed by regulated operators – a 9.2% decline compared to the previous year.
Legacy media is expected to take the largest hit in advertising, with spend expected to be reduced by as much as £45m or 11.5%, according to WARC, given higher production costs and longer lead times.
Online advertising expenditure, across video, social and search formats, is also set to decline by 7.1% or £33m by September.
On the other hand, the black market is expected to increase spending by 32% to £845m this year.
The report comes amidst intensified pressure on regulators and sports stakeholders to do more to stop the promotion of unlicensed operators.
Betting and Gaming Council Chief Executive Grainne Hurst has demanded that the government do more to counter the black market, as unlicensed advertising spend closes in on the unlicensed sector.
“The Government must go further and faster to clamp down on the black market before it is too late,” said Hurst, who noted that MPs are set to debate gambling advertising later this week.
“Targeting licensed operators when their advertising spend is already falling will not reduce overall advertising; it will simply bolster the harmful illegal black market, which is aggressively targeting UK customers. This should ring alarm bells in Westminster.”
Tax takes its toll
Operators big and small in the UK warned that any tax rises would significantly impact spending power and embolden the black market.
However, in November, Rachel Reeves confirmed a hike in remote gaming duty from 21% to 40%, which is now in effect, as well as an increase in general betting duty for remote betting to 25%, effective April 2027.
In the wake of the changes, firms such as Flutter, Entain and evoke all announced that their marketing budgets would likely shrink by as much as 20% in mitigation of these changes.
Even Paddy Power, a company widely recognised for its headline-grabbing marketing stunts, confirmed last month that it is undergoing a restructure of its marketing department, with redundancies a possibility for ‘a small number of colleagues’, according to a Flutter UK&I spokesperson.
Black market takes over
On the other hand, black market advertising, which largely takes place online where rules are less stringently enforced, is only accelerating.
Alongside a rise in spend this year to £845m, WARC expects expenditure from illicit operators to reach £934m in 2027 and top £1bn in 2028.
This data comes in the same week that Google revealed that it blocked over 270 million gambling ads in 2025, indicating that this figure is just a drop in the ocean compared to the overall extent of black market advertising.
Previous research highlighted by the BGC conducted by Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), found that operators are bypassing marketing filters used by search engines such as Google by assuming names and brands associated with trusted organisations.
In particular, affiliates promoting links to ‘not on GamStop’ casinos have been found to have hijacked defunct websites, the most high-profile being a domain once used by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
“Illegal operators are advertising aggressively online with no safeguards, no age checks and no consumer protections, posing a huge risk to consumers,” said Hurst in February when A&M’s report was published.
Sponsorship in the spotlight
An area accelerating even faster than ad spend, according to WARC, is sponsorship, as the firm reported that unregulated operators are set to account for all growth in sponsorship this year and will account for more than half of spending by October 2027.
Although overall spend on sponsorship has continued to grow from £158m in 2019/20 to a projected £260m in the 2026/27 season – spend among regulated companies peaked in 2021/22 and has declined ever since.
“This, in turn, has a notable impact on the reach and salience of these unregulated companies in the mind of the UK consumer,” read the report.
Viewers of the Premier League will be familiar with this trend, as, despite an imminent ban on gambling front-of-shirt sponsors, several teams still carry unlicensed operators as their primary sponsor.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has begun a consultation on implementing a ban on unlicensed gambling sponsorship teams, as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said that it is ‘not right’ that such companies can raise their profile without having to adhere to the same standards as UK-licensed operators.
The plans would strike a significant blow to unlicensed operators. However, no timeframe has been set out for when this would be implemented if agreed upon, meaning spending is only set to increase in the meantime.
Looking ahead to Westminster’s debate on gambling advertising, set to take place on Thursday (23 April), there is no doubt that key industry stakeholders will be watching with keen interest to see if MPs are aware of the threat of the black market and the extent of its spending power.
