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| Ronn Torossian |
The U.S. sports betting and online gaming industries spent $3.9B on marketing in 2025. Two point three percent of that went to earned media and PR. The 5WPR Gaming Trust Index published this month, documents where the rest went—and what it did and didn't build.
The breakdown tells the story plainly. Television advertising received $1.42B—36 percent of total spend. Digital performance marketing received $980M. Celebrity and athlete partnerships received $520M. Sports sponsorships received $410M. Paid social received $280M. Out-of-home received $140M. Earned media and PR received $90 million. Responsible gambling programs received $60M. The two channels at the bottom of that list generate the highest documented return on brand credibility of any in the analysis. Together they received 3.8% of the budget.
This allocation made sense in 2019. It does not make sense in 2026.
When legal sports betting was new, awareness was the real problem. Heavy TV and performance spend was the right call for a market still establishing itself. That phase is over. Thirty-eight states have legalized sports betting. The major operators—FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, ESPN Bet—are household names in every legal market. The top five operators control approximately 78 percent of national handle. Flutter and DraftKings alone are each estimated at $300M or more in annual media spend. The competitive battle has shifted from acquisition to retention, from awareness to credibility, from land-grab to regulatory goodwill. The marketing budget has not caught up to that reality.
The figure that will define how this industry is perceived by regulators and investors is the celebrity-to-responsible-gambling ratio. $520M on celebrity and athlete deals. $60M on responsible gambling programs. Nearly nine to one—in an industry with active legalization fights in California, Texas and Florida; publicly traded companies held by ESG-mandated institutional investors; and a gaming commission or legislative committee watching in almost every major market. According to the Gaming Trust Index, ESG analysts covering Flutter Entertainment, MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment have begun including responsible gambling investment as a proportion of total marketing spend in published research. The current ratio is the number those conversations reference. It is not a comfortable one to defend.
Regulators in unlicensed states are drawing conclusions from that ratio right now. California, Texas, and Florida collectively represent the largest untapped gambling market in the country. The operators who change the ratio will be materially better positioned in every licensing conversation, legislative hearing, and investor meeting for the next decade. The ones who don't will find themselves answering for it.
The land-based casino finding in the Gaming Trust Index deserves specific attention. A $67.8 billion GGR (Gross Gaming Revenue) market—MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, Wynn Resorts, Hard Rock International, Penn Entertainment, Boyd Gaming—generating millions of monthly branded searches, with almost none of those results containing operator-controlled content. Review aggregators. Financial reporting. Regulatory coverage. Wikipedia. Operator-controlled narrative is largely absent from the results that matter most. When AI-powered search tools—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews”—synthesize information about these brands, they draw from whatever content ranks.
What ranks today is almost entirely third-party. This is what the Gaming Trust Index identifies as the GEO gap: a generative engine optimization vulnerability that widens every quarter operators don't address it. The casino brand that builds a digital content infrastructure proportionate to its search presence will have a compounding structural advantage. The one that moves first shapes how AI describes it to the next generation of visitors. That is not a marginal advantage.
Online gaming tells a different but equally actionable story. iCasino and iPoker generated $12.8B in GGR in 2025 across seven legal states—and received the lowest communications investment per revenue dollar of any segment in the analysis. The market is growing faster than any other segment of U.S. gambling, and it is the most underserved from a communications standpoint. New York, Illinois, Indiana and Virginia are all in active legislative consideration, collectively representing some of the largest consumer markets in the country. Michigan's 2021 online gaming launch established the pattern clearly: operators with pre-existing earned media presence in the state achieved faster initial user acquisition at launch than those who arrived with advertising budgets alone. The pre-legalization communications window in expansion states is open now. It closes at legalization and does not reopen.
The sports betting market itself is showing signs of credibility erosion that spending alone cannot fix. Recent survey data shows that 54 percent of U.S. sports bettors say betting-related scandals involving players, officials or leagues have reduced their trust in professional sports. More than a third of bettors report that wagering makes them feel anxious. The industry's response to that erosion has been more advertising. More celebrity deals. More promotions. Those are acquisition tools applied to a retention and credibility problem. They are the wrong instrument for the current challenge.
The reallocation this industry needs is not complicated. Moving three to five percentage points of the total marketing budget toward earned media, executive visibility, responsible gambling communications and digital content infrastructure—at $3.9 billion in total spend, that is $120 to $200 million redirected—would not register on a quarterly earnings call. It would register in regulatory conversations, ESG analyst reports, legislative testimony and the search results that determine where the next ten million American bettors and casino visitors decide to spend their money.
The gambling industry has built one of the most visible and expensive advertising ecosystems in American consumer marketing. Awareness is not the problem anymore. Credibility is. The 5WPR Gaming Trust Index (5wpr.com/research/gaming-trust-index-2026) documents the gap in full—the spend breakdown, the responsible gambling audit, the GEO analysis for land-based casino and the pre-legalization opportunity for online gaming operators. The data is public and the methodology is published.
Closing the gap is a straightforward business decision. The operators who make it in the next 18 months will define the market's next phase. The ones who don't will spend the phase after that explaining why they didn't.
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Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5WPR, one of the largest independent PR firms in the United States. The 5WPR Gaming Trust Index 2026 is available free at 5wpr.com/research/gaming-trust-index-2026.
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