Report: When the Fun Stops, Stop campaign has no “protective effect”

New research has found that the much vaunted “When the Fun Stops, Stop” safer gambling slogan, introduced by the now defunct Senet Group, has failed to have an impact on the gambling public in the UK.

The Lancet, a weekly medical journal, conducted a study to test the efficacy of the most commonly used safer gambling message in the industry between 2014 and October 2021.

The presence of a visual message appearing during play was found by the research to have a 2% effectiveness in preventing further gambling online. The report stated that “the effect was so small that it would require an even larger sample size to be detected reliably”.

Conducting three experiments across football betting and casino betting, the research found that “no evidence was found for a protective effect of the most common UK safer gambling message”.

It continued: “Alternative interventions should be considered as part of an evidence-based public health approach to reducing gambling-related harm”.

Using the crowdsourcing platform Prolific, The Lancet tested users of footballbetting and roulette betting between 17 May 2019 and 17 October 2020 as to whether the appearance of the safer gambling slogan affected the participants’ gambling activity.

Funding into the research was provided by the University of Warwick, the British Academy and Leverhulme and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Experiments one and three saw participants gambling real money on the outcome of football matches, with experiment number two offering participants cash to bet on roulette.

The BGC took control of the “When the Fun Stops, Stop” campaign from the Senet group in April 2020.