One firm’s review tallies $520 million on star endorsements last year and just $60 million on player-safety efforts, a gap worth weighing seriously, provided you remember who did the tallying.
- Across 2025, an audit reckons betting companies in the U.S. put about $520 million behind famous endorsers while steering only around $60 million into player-safety work
- Stack those together and the split runs 8.7 to one, leaving safer-gambling efforts with a mere 1.5% of a $3.9 billion promotional budget
- Keep one thing in view: the study is the work of 5W, a public relations shop, and what it prescribes is heavier spending on the very communications work such firms sell
- Of the 30 brands graded, BetMGM topped the safer-gambling scorecard while the sweepstakes site Stake.us came in dead last
- And there is a twist, since 70% of the general public told YouGov a celebrity makes no difference to how they view a betting brand, poking a hole in the marketing case to begin with
Sit through a few hours of live sports and the celebrity pitches run together, a parade of athletes and actors hawking the same betting apps. A fresh industry review tries to attach a dollar figure to that glitz, then measures it against the money operators spend teaching customers to play it safe. The distance between the two is enormous, but so is the asterisk on who ran the numbers.
The Headline Figure
Start with the number everyone is quoting. A new audit calculates that American betting firms funneled roughly $520 million into deals with famous faces last year, set against something close to $60 million aimed at responsible gambling and the messaging around it, a split of 8.7 to one. Flip it around and safer play claimed all of 1.5 percent of the sector’s estimated $3.9 billion promotional outlay. To get there, the researchers combed two years of data covering 30 companies spanning online casino, land-based venues, and sports betting, sifting tens of thousands of press mentions, hundreds of financial and regulatory filings, and thousands of test questions posed to AI search tools.
Follow the Dollars
The endorsement line is just one slice. The report’s real punchline sits at the bottom of the ledger: safer-gambling programs drew only $60 million, and public relations and earned media just $90 million, about 2.3 percent. Everything else towers over them. Television swallowed the most by a mile at $1.42 billion, north of a third of the whole budget, with digital ads close behind near $980 million. The famous-face deals accounted for their $520 million, and trailing them came sports sponsorships at $410 million, paid social at $280 million, and billboards and other out-of-home signage at $140 million. Line it all up and the money spent slapping a celebrity onto a spot tops the entire safer-play budget many times over.
Who Is Doing the Counting
This belongs near the top rather than tucked away. The analysis is the product of 5W, among the larger independent public relations firms in the country, and the fix it lands on is for operators to shift three to five points of their budgets, somewhere between $117 million and $195 million, into communications and earned media, precisely the sort of work such agencies are hired to deliver. None of that makes the $520 million or the $60 million inaccurate; both line up with what companies report. Even so, a study urging betting brands to buy more public relations, written by a public relations firm, reads as much like a sales deck as a public-health warning. And that $60 million reflects safer-gambling programs and messaging the way 5W chose to count them, which is not automatically the same as every dollar flowing into state-required payments or problem-gambling funds.
Grading the Operators
5W also ran each company through a 100-point scorecard weighing things like regulator outreach, executive visibility, disclosure, media footprint, and how often a brand surfaced when AI tools were asked about player safety. Atop the sportsbooks, BetMGM edged out FanDuel and DraftKings, and it led the online casino group as well, while its land-based sibling MGM Resorts paced that category. At the other end of the sports betting list sat bet365, Fanatics Sportsbook, and ESPN Bet. And across the sweepstakes casinos that made the cut, Stake.us finished below every other operator studied, its setup described by 5W as the thinnest in that corner of the market even as the brand markets aggressively.
The Disclosure Gap
The dollars aside, the audit dwells on how rarely any of it is spelled out. Among the dozen publicly traded operators it studied, just four break out their safer-gambling investment as a percentage of what they spend on marketing; the others cite a bare dollar figure or bury it entirely. Their outreach to regulators looked equally sparse: officials in 11 of 38 legal states reported that fewer than three operators a year bother to contact them about safer play without being prompted. With legalization battles and ESG reviews bearing down, the report contends, that quiet is starting to come with a price tag.
Does the Star Power Even Land?
An irony runs underneath the whole debate. Surveying Americans earlier in 2026, YouGov found the effect muted and mixed. Seventy percent of the general public said a celebrity made no difference to how they viewed a betting brand. Gamblers were warmer, with 43 percent saying a famous face helps a brand “stand out,” yet 46 percent of them also said such deals make a brand seem “less authentic,” and only 34 percent called a celebrity-backed brand more trustworthy. Read together, the findings imply that star campaigns still buy eyeballs while doing little for credibility, which chips at the spending priorities from another direction entirely: operators may be shelling out for wattage that leaves most of the public unmoved.
Why the Timing Stings
Context is what gives these figures teeth. Ohio legislators just filed a measure to scrap online sports betting outright on addiction grounds, and fights over whether to legalize are simmering in Texas, Florida, and California, where critics reach for exactly this kind of mismatch. Whatever you make of a PR firm’s remedy, the bare contrast, fortunes spent on being seen and a rounding error spent on safety, is the sort of stat that surfaces in a statehouse hearing or gets flagged on an investor’s ESG dashboard. That, far more than any theory about advertising, is what could make it hard for operators across the U.S. gambling market to shrug off much longer.