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Sports Betting is the Tobacco Industry of the Digital Age
Aggressive innovative marketing, addictive products, and media saturation. Sports betting apps are using a formula we’ve seen before, and it’s working

In the 2005 movie “Thank You for Smoking” a character named BR (played the tremendously talented JK Simmons) is in the middle of a meeting with his fellow tobacco executives discussing slumping sales when says the truest statement that has ever been uttered about that industry.
“We don't sell Tic Tacs for Christ's sake. We sell cigarettes. And they're cool and available and addictive. The job is almost done for us!”
The cigarette industry once dominated retail advertising space and customer mind share, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. Today it has been regulated and limited in its cultural scope and as a result has seen a downturn in sales. But old things often must be moved aside to make way for new things. And the playbook that cigarette companies used all those years ago has found a new home, with a new vice: legalized sports betting, the tobacco of the digital age.
The Cool Factor
When I was growing up in the 1990s, cigarette ads were everywhere. They were on billboards, in magazines, and on the sides of taxi cabs. They were sending a very direct message to potential customers that smoking was cool. There was the rugged individualism of Marlboro, the suave ridiculousness of Joe Camel, and the exciting social life that was portrayed by Virginia Slims. The positioning was very social, that smoking was an activity that was done by an outgoing group of people.
The marketing was so good in fact, that there have been countless initiatives and causes created to send anti-smoking messages, highlighting the health risks of tobacco products. This, of course, did not work since saying how bad something is will more often than not make people want to try it more, a psychological phenomenon called reactance.
Many of the people I have talked to about smoking have insisted that peer pressure was a driving factor to start smoking. I saw this firsthand as a teenager and as an adult. When I was in high school in Jordan, smoking was very common with countless students rushing to bathrooms for a few puffs in between classes. There were friendships made over smoking, meaning that if you didn’t smoke you were at something of a disadvantage socially. As an adult there was a similar dynamic in the restaurant industry since smoking was one of the only ways to get a break during your shift. To that degree smoking was normalized socially, despite its very well-known health risks.
But in today’s day and age, smoking is on the decline. Legalized sports betting has taken its place. Apps like FanDuel, DraftKings, and BetMGM have become household names, using a similar playbook to what we saw from big tobacco decades ago. In the 1940s and 50s, cigarette companies paid doctors and physicians to recommend their products amid growing fear that cigarettes were bad for you. This helped to delegitimize the health concern. Sports betting apps similarly use people that are close to the games: current and former athletes.

Cigarettes and sports betting apps have used similar advertising methods to attract customers such as influencer marketing and sex appeal
By having someone like Rob Gronkowski or Drew Brees speak about being “a part of the action” or using other sports-related vocabulary to describe winning a bet, betting apps are making the average person invested in a game. This investment is good for leagues and for the betting apps themselves as the rush that comes from winning a bet will surely lead to repeat customers.
These apps have told customers that they will “get in on the game”, have used sexualized marketing (golfer Paige Spiranic’s PointsBet ads come to mind here), and the promises of huge payouts through various bet types are all reminiscent of what we have seen from the tobacco industry. And much like big tobacco, gambling apps rely on celebrity and influencer marketing to saturate the minds of prospective customers.
Influencer Marketing
In the mid-20th century, cigarette companies often commanded a who’s who of celebrities and personalities. John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Lucile Ball, and Bob Hope were all fixtures for tobacco products in the 1950s. Yesterday’s movie and TV star is today’s content creator and influencer. Podcasts have never been more popular. And in the sports world, that has been fodder for sports betting apps.
Popular podcasts like Pardon My Take, the Bill Simmons Podcast, the Pat McAfee Show, the Ryen Russillo Podcast, and New Heights all have partnerships with betting apps. Most of the shows even have dedicated segments in their shows dedicated to offering picks for the week’s games, with promo codes and sponsored bets.
As we have seen throughout the past couple of years, podcasts and the people that host them can have significant sway with rising audience numbers since 2021. As the money from betting apps have come in, they have swayed the way that hosts talk about sports with terms like point spread, parlay, and teaser becoming as common as the name of your favorite quarterback.
The integration of betting apps into podcasts is akin to the normalization of smoking in the movies and TV shows in the past. It is the normalization of betting without full acknowledgement of the addiction element that is forever present. Disclaimers are often mentioned after betting segments, but they are read sometimes at enhanced speed and often skipped over by the listener. They are the Surgeon General’s Warning but in digital form.
FanDuel has been very aggressive in continuing to attract a variety of talent to promote its brand. It has also ventured into the world of broadcast rights and has its own TV network where well-known personalities like Michelle Beadle, Kay Adams, and Chandler Parsons occupy the airwaves. Sportsbooks have also used these partnerships to gain access with the major sports leagues to become official sports betting partners of the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. This far reaching diversification is also similar to what we have seen from tobacco giant Philip Morris International, who owns multiple cigarette brands in addition to smoke free products and funds research into a smoke-free future.
Diversification and influencer marketing is important to both tobacco and betting companies because they are predicated on being both approachable and trendy. They offer an addictive product that likely tiptoes on the gray area of ethical responsibility. They have both successfully exploited the market that they were in and leveraged the addictive nature of their products to amass customers.
An Addictive Vice
In 1970, the US Congress banned the ability for cigarette companies to air their advertisements on television. The ban came as a result of pressure that was placed on President Richard Nixon by health advocates, leading into an outright ban of the ads which were incredibly frequent on TV in the 60s. Since then, cigarette companies have had to come up with inventive ways to market their product. The cigarette companies turned to ads on public transportation, magazines, newspapers, and billboards. Most of those eventually went away as the war on tobacco has persisted to this day.
The reason that tobacco companies were able to circumvent all the roadblocks that the government laid at their feet was that they offered a highly addictive product that was wildly accessible. Today, a pack of cigarettes costs around $6 per pack. In the 80s and 90s, it was just over a dollar for a pack, and well under 50 cents per pack in the 60s and 70s. Cigarettes were in the media, all over the world, and were incredibly accessible. Convenience stores, grocery stores, and drug stores all carried them back then.
On top of this, cigarette companies often offer coupons through direct mail and even had field representatives that went into bars to discuss their latest products with potential customers. Where illegal narcotics cost more and were comparatively hard to obtain, cigarettes were just as easy to buy as a bag of chips. This combination of availability and accessibility helped to spur the popularity.
Today, we are surrounded by gadgets. Smartphones, laptops, and tablets are owned by virtually everyone. 92% of Americans own a smartphone, 73% own a laptop, and 53% own a tablet. These devices have app stores and web browsers, which are the convenience and drug stores of a sports betting app. Customers in 29 states can place a bet with their mobile device. It is as simple as opening the app, loading money into your account, and placing a wager. It is incredibly accessible.

Getting started on these apps has an incredibly low financial cost of entry. Most apps will require a $5 minimum deposit, and bets can be placed for as little as one dollar. Plus, with new user sign-ups, there are often free plays and bonus bets to give users a taste of what it feels like to win a bet. This sort of free sampling is a tried-and-true method that we are familiar with from retailers like Costco.
Sports betting revenue continues to rise as the years pass and its integration into our society increases. They have employed the strategies that have worked for cigarette companies in the past: meeting consumers where they are, employing well known influencers and celebrities, and leaning into the cool factor of their product. But much like tobacco, it is hard to separate the negative aspects of sports betting from its overall story.

Getting Hooked
During the prime years of the industry in the 1960s and 1970s, cigarette addiction affected roughly 40% of adults. In the 1980s and 1990s, youth cigarette addiction peaked at around 30%. Today, those numbers are much lower with 11% of adults and 4% of youth in the United States reporting cigarette addiction. Much of this decline can be attributed to the introduction of alternative smoking products, limits on advertising, and the push by government agencies to publicize the health risks of smoking cigarettes.
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) people that bet on sports are twice as likely to encounter gambling addiction problems. Currently, 16% of sports bettors exhibit behaviors tied to addiction while an additional 13% have displayed warning signs that could lead to addiction down the road. As gambling becomes more engrained in the fabric of the sports that we watch, these numbers are expected to continue to rise.
This growth has been exponential, with the number of people betting on games increasing by 80% since 2021 according to a survey conducted by Morning Consult. In 2024, sportsbooks generated over $40 billion in revenue because of this ubiquity. These numbers cannot be ignored and as a result we have seen more and more of its influence permeate sports, much as seeing cigarette ads and scenes with product placement were common decades ago.
Podcasts often have betting segments, and this has spawned a cottage industry of content creators that focus on making bets. Shows like The Favorites, Bet the Board, and The Simple Handicap have all gained loyal followers for the picks they make on every episode with the intent of guiding listeners to make the right wagers. But it doesn’t stop with content creators.
Since the leagues and broadcast partners themselves have official betting sponsors, we have seen betting terminology injected into live telecasts as well as sports commentary shows. In the middle of games, we will see live odds to be able to bet on in the moment, a game preview will show a point spread, and some shows will have featured parlays that the host likes for the upcoming slate of games. This is a normalization of gambling that has many younger viewers hooked, which has had some adverse side effects.
The combination of an always-on sportsbook with the world of social media has led to fans lashing out at athletes when they lose bets. As player prop bets are increasing in popularity, many fans can point their ire towards a specific player as opposed to a team when they lose a bet. This has led to many fans DM’ing players with hateful messages or tagging them in posts and degrading them.

Players often ignore this, but it has been mentioned in comments to the press and posts on social media. Perhaps the most vocal critic of this is Kevin Durant. The Suns forward has often made fun of disappointed gamblers by saying “When them parlays don’t hit, I’m every name in the book. Y’all not real”.
In many ways, this has led to an entitlement by fans to feel that they can simply speak this way to people without repercussions. The constant exposure to odds of games has also led more people to be vocal about accusations that the games we watch every week are fixed or rigged because of the amount of money flowing into one side or another on FanDuel or DraftKings. This sort of delusion is not too far off from bogus claims that the cigarette lobby spun in its marketing material to ease concerns about cigarettes.
More than anything though, sports betting is fun and that is a big part of its success. There is a thrill when you win a bet, similar to the rush of nicotine from a cigarette. We are in the excess stages of its product life cycle. We have exited the rapid growth period as the main players (FanDuel and DraftKings) have solidified themselves. As addiction numbers continue to climb there will be pressure for some regulation on marketing and messaging. Until then, we can expect a continued integration until more stories of the darker aspects of the medium present themselves more profoundly as they did with the health element with cigarettes.
At its core, the cigarette industry sold us a product that we couldn’t easily quit with amazing marketing beside it. It is an effective strategy aimed at maximizing customer retention while marketing said product as a trendy normalcy. That is what sports betting apps have become. For many people they are on the home page of their smartphones, ready to be utilized during games at a rapid pace, with the promise of potential riches. Often, the story does not end that way. The marketing machine will not let it, and in that way tobacco and betting are truly two sides of the same coin.