How the US gambling industry spent 8.7 times more on celebrity partnerships than on responsible gambling communications, and what that costs in regulatory, ESG, and AI search outcomes.
A Study by the 5W Research Division. Published May 2026.
Executive Summary
The US sports betting, online gaming, and land-based casino industries spent $3.9 billion on marketing and advertising in 2025. $520 million went to celebrity and athlete endorsement partnerships. $60 million went to responsible gambling programs and communications. The ratio is 8.7 to 1.
That ratio is now appearing in ESG analyst reports covering Flutter Entertainment, MGM Resorts, and Caesars Entertainment. It is appearing in legislative testimony in California, Texas, and Florida, the three largest unlicensed states. It is appearing in the citations that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews return when American consumers ask which gambling operators are most trustworthy.
This audit examined 30 operators across sports betting, iGaming, and land-based casino. It analyzed 47,000+ earned media articles, 180+ ESG disclosures and 10-K filings, 240+ state regulator filings and testimony transcripts, and 2,400+ AI engine queries across the five major LLM-powered search platforms.
The headline finding: the gambling industry has built one of the most visible advertising operations in American consumer marketing in five years. It has not built the credibility infrastructure to match it. The gap between celebrity spend and responsible gambling spend is no longer an internal marketing decision. It is a quantifiable risk to licensing, valuation, and the AI-generated narratives that determine where the next decade of US gambling consumers will spend their money.
What Are the Six Headline Findings?
- The 8.7-to-1 ratio. $520M on celebrity and athlete endorsements versus $60M on responsible gambling programs across the US industry in 2025. No publicly traded operator surveyed has issued a specific defense of this ratio in investor communications.
- Earned media underinvestment. $90M on earned media and PR against $3.9B total spend, 2.3% of total marketing. Across the same operator set, 34% of branded search results on Google now contain content the operator does not control.
- ESG disclosure gap. Of the 12 publicly traded US gambling operators reviewed, 4 disclose responsible gambling investment as a percentage of marketing spend in annual reports. The other 8 disclose dollar figures only, or do not break out the line item.
- Regulator communications asymmetry. State gaming commissioners in 11 of 38 legal markets reported in public testimony or commission meetings that they receive responsible gambling communications, unprompted, from fewer than three operators per year. The remaining operators communicate reactively, in response to specific incidents or licensing requirements.
- The AI citation gap. When the five major AI search engines were asked "Which sports betting operators have the strongest responsible gambling programs?", BetMGM and DraftKings were named in 78% and 64% of responses respectively. Six other major operators were cited in fewer than 20% of responses. Citations skew heavily toward operators with the largest digital content footprints, not necessarily the largest RG investments.
- The pre-legalization penalty. In Michigan (2021), Ohio (2023), and North Carolina (2024), the three most recent major sports betting launches, operators that published responsible gambling content in state media outlets in the 18 months before legalization achieved measurably faster regulatory approval timelines and lower licensing-stage scrutiny than operators that did not.
What Is the Methodology Behind This Audit?
The study window runs from May 1, 2024 to April 30, 2026, 24 months. Thirty operators were reviewed across three segments: sports betting, online casino and iGaming, and land-based casino.
How Does the 5W RG Communications Index Score Operators?
Each operator was scored on a 100-point scale across five dimensions, 20 points each: investment transparency (public disclosure of RG spend as a percentage of marketing budget, and SEC and ESG reporting clarity), earned media footprint (tier-1 and trade press coverage of RG initiatives over 24 months), executive visibility (CEO, CMO, and Chief Compliance Officer public statements, op-eds, and conference appearances on responsible gambling topics), regulator engagement (unprompted communications with state gaming commissions outside of mandatory reporting cycles, and public testimony quality), and AI citation share (citation frequency in LLM-powered search results for responsible gambling, problem gambling, and operator-trust queries).
Where Is the US Gambling Industry Actually Spending Its Marketing Budget?
| Marketing Channel | 2025 US Industry Spend | Share of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Television advertising | $1.42B | 36.4% |
| Digital performance marketing | $980M | 25.1% |
| Celebrity and athlete partnerships | $520M | 13.3% |
| Sports sponsorships | $410M | 10.5% |
| Paid social | $280M | 7.2% |
| Out-of-home | $140M | 3.6% |
| Earned media and PR | $90M | 2.3% |
| Responsible gambling programs | $60M | 1.5% |
| Total | $3.9B | 100% |
Table caption: 2025 US gambling industry marketing spend by channel, sourced from Kantar Media, MediaRadar, iSpot.tv, AGA Responsible Gaming reporting, NCPG corporate disclosures, and operator earnings reports.
The two channels at the bottom of this table, earned media at 2.3% and responsible gambling at 1.5%, are the two channels most directly correlated with the outcomes that determine long-term operator value: regulatory approval, ESG ratings, brand trust scores, and AI-generated search descriptions. Together they receive 3.8% of the industry budget.
How Does Gambling's 8.7-to-1 Ratio Compare to Other Regulated Industries?
The $520M celebrity-and-athlete spend against $60M in responsible gambling spend works out to an 8.7-to-1 ratio ($520M ÷ $60M = 8.67, rounded to 8.7 throughout this report).
For comparison across regulated consumer industries: the US tobacco industry drove its advertising-to-public-health-communications ratio below 1.5-to-1 within five years of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, primarily through state-mandated counter-advertising and FCC restrictions. The US alcohol industry currently spends approximately 4-to-1 on advertising versus responsible drinking programs, per 2024 disclosures from the Beer Institute, Distilled Spirits Council, and Wine Institute. The US pharmaceutical industry's FDA-mandated risk communication rides alongside every promotional message, producing a structurally enforced near-1-to-1 ratio. The US gambling industry's current ratio, 8.7-to-1, is the highest of any regulated American consumer category that includes a public-health dimension.
What Are ESG Analysts Saying About This Ratio?
Three institutional research desks have begun including responsible gambling investment as a percentage of total marketing spend in published research notes covering Flutter Entertainment, MGM Resorts, and Caesars Entertainment: Sustainalytics gambling sector reports (March 2026), MSCI ESG Ratings methodology updates for the consumer services sector (Q1 2026), and ISS ESG corporate rating reviews for publicly traded gambling operators.
ESG-mandated institutional investors holding shares in US gambling operators include CalPERS, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, Norges Bank Investment Management, and the California State Teachers' Retirement System. Each has published ESG screening criteria that intersect with responsible gambling disclosures. The ratio is no longer a marketing department metric. It is a capital markets metric.
How Do Sports Betting, iGaming, and Land-Based Casino Compare?
Sports betting spent an estimated $2.6B in total marketing in 2025, including an estimated $390M on celebrity and athlete partnerships against an estimated $32M on responsible gambling. BetMGM leads the segment's RG Communications Index at 78 of 100, built on its GameSense partnership with the Massachusetts Gaming Commission and other state regulators. DraftKings follows at 71, built on its My Stat Sheet personalized RG dashboard and partnership with Kindbridge Behavioral Health. FanDuel scores 66, held back by an earned media footprint that trails BetMGM and DraftKings despite comparable program investment. At the bottom of the segment, ESPN Bet scores 38, Fanatics Sportsbook scores 34, and bet365 scores 29, each showing minimal or unpublished dedicated RG communications relative to their market presence.
Online casino and iGaming is the most underspent segment in this audit: an estimated $740M in total marketing against an estimated $14M in responsible gambling spend, even as the segment generated $12.8 billion in GGR in 2025 across the seven states that have legalized iCasino. BetMGM Casino leads the segment at 74, inheriting the MGM Resorts GameSense framework. Stake.us, a sweepstakes-model operator, scores 22, the segment's least developed RG communications infrastructure relative to its US marketing presence. Most iGaming operators rely on parent-company sportsbook RG content rather than producing iGaming-specific responsible gambling communications, despite iGaming having different addiction patterns, player demographics, and intervention windows than sports betting.
Land-based casino shows the largest gap between operational scale and digital RG presence: an estimated $560M in total marketing against an estimated $14M in responsible gambling spend, even though the segment generated $67.8 billion in GGR in 2025, more than five times iGaming's GGR, and operates the industry's most established physical RG infrastructure. MGM Resorts International leads the entire audit at 81 of 100, the highest score of any operator studied, built on its GameSense rollout across MGM properties and annual ESG disclosure of RG spend as a percentage of marketing. Las Vegas Sands scores 41, held down by a domestic footprint divestiture that has shifted corporate communications priorities toward Macao operations. Casino floors carry signage, brochures, and on-property RG infrastructure that exceeds anything online operators have built, but none of it translates into earned media. A typical land-based operator's RG program is invisible to a consumer using ChatGPT to research the brand, because the communications layer has not been built on top of the operational layer.
What Do AI Engines Say About Operator RG Programs?
5W ran 12 standardized prompts across ChatGPT-5, Claude Opus 4.7, Perplexity Pro, Google Gemini 2.5, and Google AI Overviews between February 1 and April 30, 2026. Each prompt ran 20 times across the five engines, 2,400 total queries, and citations were tabulated. Sample prompts included "Which sports betting operators have the strongest responsible gambling programs?", "Is BetMGM safe for problem gamblers?", "What is GameSense and which casinos use it?", and "Has DraftKings been criticized for predatory marketing practices?"
| Operator | Citation Share |
|---|---|
| BetMGM | 78% |
| DraftKings | 64% |
| MGM Resorts | 47% |
| FanDuel | 41% |
| Caesars Entertainment | 33% |
| Hard Rock | 19% |
| Wynn Resorts | 12% |
| Penn Entertainment | 9% |
| ESPN Bet | 7% |
| Boyd Gaming | 4% |
Table caption: Citation share on responsible-gambling-topic prompts across ChatGPT-5, Claude Opus 4.7, Perplexity Pro, Google Gemini 2.5, and Google AI Overviews, 2,400 queries run by the 5W Research Division, February 1 to April 30, 2026.
Why it works: the two operators that have invested most consistently in content infrastructure describing their RG programs, not necessarily the operators that have invested most in the programs themselves, dominate AI engine citations. AI engines do not have access to operator marketing dashboards. They retrieve whatever content has been published, indexed, and cited by other sources, documented across the 47,000+ earned media articles reviewed for this audit between May 2024 and April 2026. The operators that build that content layer determine how AI engines describe them. The operators that do not are described instead by Wikipedia, regulatory filings, news coverage of enforcement actions, and review aggregators, none of which lead with responsible gambling.
How Do Operators Communicate With State Regulators?
5W reviewed public testimony, commission meeting minutes, and rulemaking comments filed with state gaming control boards in 12 states across the study window. BetMGM and MGM Resorts engaged regulators on responsible gambling topics, unprompted, in 9 of 12 states. DraftKings engaged in 8 of 12, FanDuel in 7 of 12, and Caesars Sportsbook and Caesars Entertainment in 6 of 12. Every other operator studied engaged in fewer than 3 of 12 states.
"We hear from a small number of operators consistently. We hear from most of them only when there is a specific compliance matter. There is a clear distinction in the relationships." — Massachusetts Gaming Commission public meeting, October 2025
That distinction will matter in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Missouri. The operators that have built regulator relationships in mature legal markets enter pre-legalization conversations in new markets with measurable advantages. The operators that have not, do not.
What Should Operators Do to Close the Communications Gap?
Disclose responsible gambling investment as a percentage of marketing spend in annual reports, ESG disclosures, and sustainability reports. The number does not need to be large to be useful. It needs to be visible, because ESG analysts cannot include what is not disclosed.
Build owned-media RG content infrastructure that AI engines can cite directly: operator-controlled landing pages, executive bylines, partnership announcements, and third-party validations. Without it, AI engines describe an operator's RG program using third-party content the operator did not commission and cannot edit.
Establish executive visibility on RG topics outside of crisis windows through op-eds in outlets like Forbes, Fortune, and PRWeek, and through conference appearances at G2E, ICE, SBC Summit, and NCPG conferences, maintained continuously rather than activated only in response to a crisis.
Engage regulators, unprompted, in markets the operator does not yet serve. California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Missouri are the highest-priority pre-legalization markets. Regulator relationships built 18 months before legalization compound. Relationships introduced at the licensing stage do not, a pattern documented in the pre-legalization penalty finding above.
Invest in earned media at parity with celebrity partnerships. Moving 3 to 5 percentage points of total marketing budget toward earned media, executive visibility, RG communications, and GEO content infrastructure represents $117M to $195M redirected at industry scale. That reallocation does not register on a quarterly earnings call. It registers in regulatory approvals, ESG ratings, investor presentations, and the AI-generated search results that determine where the next decade of American gambling consumers first encounter these brands.
This same citation dynamic, where AI engines cite the operators with the strongest content infrastructure rather than the strongest underlying programs, shows up across the gambling category more broadly in 5W's US Sports Betting and Gaming AI Visibility Index 2026, and in the adjacent prediction markets category in the Prediction Markets AI Visibility Index 2026.
What Comes Next?
The 5W Research Division will publish quarterly updates to the RG Communications Index throughout 2026 and 2027, tracking operator score changes across the 30 audited operators, new entrant scoring as additional operators launch in legal markets, AI citation share changes across the five major LLM-powered search engines, ESG disclosure improvements at publicly traded operators, and state-by-state pre-legalization communications readiness in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, and Missouri.
For research inquiries, methodology questions, or operator-specific scoring discussions, contact the 5W Research Division at research@5wpr.com.
5W's Casino and Gambling PR practice works with operators on exactly the disclosure, earned media, and regulator communications gaps this audit documents. 5W runs AI Search (GEO) programs for brands across consumer, B2B, financial services, healthcare, and technology, building the machine-readable footprint that gets brands cited, not just ranked. Learn more at 5W's Generative Engine Optimization practice.
