The Gambling Industry Spends $3.9 Billion on Marketing. Almost None of It Builds Credibility.

The U.S. sports betting and online gaming industries spent $3.9 billion on marketing in 2025. Television advertising received $1.42 billion. Celebrity and athlete partnerships received $520 million. Responsible gambling programs received $60 million. Earned media and PR received $90 million — 2.3% of the total.

Those figures come from the Gaming Trust Index, 5WPR’s first annual study of marketing spend allocation and brand credibility outcomes across the top U.S. sports betting, online gaming, and land-based casino operators. The data is sourced from Kantar Media, MediaRadar, iSpot.tv, and public financial disclosures from the major publicly traded operators. The methodology is published in full.

The numbers tell a clear story.

The industry has an awareness surplus and a credibility deficit.

Thirty-eight states have legalized sports betting. The top five operators — FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, ESPN Bet — control 78% of handle. Any American who watches sports can name at least two of them without thinking. The awareness phase of this industry’s development is complete.

The marketing allocation has not caught up. The same channels that solved a 2019 awareness problem are receiving the same budget share in 2025, in a market where the problem is no longer awareness. It is credibility. Retention. Regulatory goodwill. The brand equity that determines which operators are still standing when the market consolidates.

Credibility does not come from a television spot. It comes from earned media coverage, executive visibility, responsible gambling investment that is genuine rather than cosmetic, and the digital content infrastructure that determines how a brand is described when people research it. Those channels are receiving 3.8% of the industry’s total marketing spend.

The $520 million question.

The industry spent $520 million on celebrity and athlete partnerships in 2025. It spent $60 million on responsible gambling programs.

Celebrity partnerships are not the problem. They drive awareness and short-term acquisition metrics that matter. The problem is the ratio — nearly nine to one between borrowed credibility and owned credibility, in an industry with active legalization fights in California, Texas, and Florida, with ESG analysts scrutinizing publicly traded operator balance sheets, and with state gaming commissions watching how operators present themselves on player protection.

Regulators in unlicensed states are drawing conclusions from this ratio right now. The operators who change it will be in a different conversation in every licensing hearing, legislative committee, and investor meeting over the next decade. The ones who don’t will find themselves defending a number that becomes harder to defend every year.

Land-based casino has a different problem with the same root.

MGM Resorts. Caesars Entertainment. Wynn Resorts. Hard Rock International. These brands generate millions of monthly branded searches — organic digital presence that most consumer companies would restructure their entire marketing strategy to achieve.

Almost none of those search results contain operator-controlled content. Review aggregators. Financial reporting. Regulatory coverage. Wikipedia. The operators have not built the owned and earned digital content to shape what appears when consumers research their brands.

This matters now in a way it did not two years ago. When AI-powered search tools synthesize information about a brand, they draw from whatever content ranks for that brand. Operators who have not invested in digital content infrastructure are ceding their narratives to third parties. The first major casino operator to build a content strategy proportionate to its search presence will have a compounding advantage. Every quarter the others wait, the gap widens.

Online gaming is the most underspent opportunity in the analysis.

Seven states have legalized iCasino and iPoker. New York, Illinois, Indiana, and Virginia are in active legislative consideration. Online gaming generated $12.8 billion in GGR in 2025 and receives the lowest communications investment per revenue dollar of any segment in the study.

The 2021 Michigan online gaming launch established a pattern worth noting: operators with pre-existing earned media presence in the state achieved faster initial user acquisition than those who arrived with advertising budgets alone. The window to build that presence in New York, Illinois, Indiana, and Virginia is open now. It closes at legalization. Once every operator arrives with a TV buy, the first-mover advantage in earned media disappears.

What the reallocation looks like.

Moving 3 to 5 percentage points of the total $3.9 billion budget toward earned media, executive visibility, responsible gambling communications, and digital content strategy. That is $120 to $200 million. It would not register as a meaningful variance in a quarterly earnings call. It would register in regulatory approvals, ESG ratings, brand loyalty data, and the AI-generated search results that determine how the next generation of bettors and casino visitors first encounters these brands.

The gambling industry has built the most visible advertising ecosystem in American consumer marketing in five years from a standing start. The next challenge is building the credibility infrastructure to match it.

The full Gaming Trust Index 2026 is available free at 5wpr.com/research/gaming-trust-index-2026.

Ronn Torossian is the founder of 5WPR. The Gaming Trust Index is published annually by 5WPR Research Division.