How do sports betting apps shape harmful gambling experiences?

This is a joint seminar with the Business School.

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Speaker: Lauren Gurrieri is an Associate Professor of Marketing and the Co-Director of the Centre for Organisations and Social Change at RMIT University, Australia. Her research examines gender, consumption and the marketplace, with a focus on the inequalities and harms (re)produced and experienced across consumer and digital cultures. She has authored over 40 peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, case studies and commissioned reports and has been awarded over $600,000 in external research funding. She is a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project examining how young adults use, communicate about and experience mobile phone sports betting applications. Her research has been featured across local and global media; she serves on the boards of GENMAC and ShEqual; and is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing Management.

Abstract: In recent years, the online gambling industry has rapidly expanded worldwide, with most revenues now derived from online sports betting. The smartphone has transformed gambling, becoming the device of choice for sports betting gamblers and a driver of the normalisation and growing availability of gambling in everyday life. Yet, research focused on online gambling remains at a nascent stage and tends to focus on what features of smartphones are preferred by betting consumers and how these facilitate harmful betting behaviours. To focus on the gambling apps themselves, we explore the environment of expected use of gambling apps to understand how betting apps guide users and shape their online experiences of gambling, especially in ways that foster or promote harm. Through empirical insights derived from a researcher-led walkthrough of two popular sports betting apps and visual ethnographic research of consumers of these apps, we further advance understanding of the harmful implications of the platformisation of gambling as an expression of techno-capitalism.

 

Lauren Gurrieri, RMIT University, Australia