This blog post describes how The Behavioural Insights Team conducted an online experiment to test the impact of features of advertisements on slot gambling behaviour. This involved testing five versions of a slot game advertisement, each with a different set of features. A group of 5,975 participants were exposed to an advertisement embedded in a social media feed. Then participants were invited to gamble on a slots game. In one of the advertisements, the researchers realized that they unintentionally included the phrase “Players of Fruit Rush lose £7 for every £10 bet on average” instead of “lose £7 for every £100”. This realization occured after the publication of findings of the experiment.
Findings related to this error suggested that:
- Return to player information changes gambling behaviour.
- Adding return to player information to the advertisement improved people's trust.
- Most people did not notice the return to player information on the advertisement.
