What are the big trends in affiliate compliance monitoring?

After 18 months or so of intense scrutiny, the affiliate compliance landscape has started to become clearer in some territories while others are still causing some confusion to both operators and affiliates. In this article, I’ll explain how some of our clients are dealing with the issues and identify some affiliate monitoring trends in the UK, Sweden, the US and beyond.

It seems logical to start in the UK as that’s where the initial focus on affiliate compliance started. The UKGC is pretty hot on ensuring that operators demonstrate that they have procedures to monitor affiliate marketing but are less keen on providing specifics on how that is achieved. There is some logic in this: if they are too specific then it leaves scope for affiliates to exploit loopholes while a vaguer approach allows for more common-sense judgements to be applied.

The general feeling among the compliance officers we deal with is that affiliate marketing issues fall into two camps: serious breaches and “other”. In the former camp, almost every client requests that we search out pages on websites and social media which allude to gambling improving one’s lifestyle or suggesting that it is a way to get rid of life’s problems. Similarly, anything that suggests a player can consistently come out on top by exploiting loopholes or by following patterns and systems is an increasingly popular request.

Clean up

In the latter camp, our most popular UK reports are providing percentage accuracy reports on the representation of “significant terms” alongside promotions and on searching out expired bonuses. I think it is fair to say that even the UKGC recognises that cleaning up historic compliance issues such as old bonus data is never going to be fulfilled 100% but the key aspect here is that the operator can demonstrate when asked that they are using their best endeavours to do so. This examination forms a regular part of a UKGC audit now and client feedback from those backs up that summation.

The marketing landscape in Sweden has taken a more aggressive turn this year and it won’t have escaped anyone’s attention that some very large operators have received marketing compliance related fines recently. While the UK seems to hide marketing fines behind AML and player protection reasons (which I fear could lead to some complacency on affiliate compliance), Sweden is far more direct. Just recently, we have been setting up much stricter reports for identifying the use of time sensitive calls to action on affiliate sites (CTA’s that express some form of urgency). It’s fair to say that Sweden is fast becoming the strictest European regulator.

Elsewhere in Europe, while there are certain directives in countries like Denmark and Holland regarding advertising on country-code domains and in specific languages and also in Italy which has been very clear on how it views gambling advertising, the landscape is still a bit muddier. We and our clients are taking the approach that most jurisdictions will take a lead from the UK and Sweden and certain searches, such as the “lifestyle” reports we run in the UK are logical starting points.

Across the pond in the US, one report dominates our conversations: searching for pages and affiliate sites that promote licensed brands alongside unlicensed brands. The DGE has been very clear on this one as we saw recently with the OddsShark ruling, although there is still some confusion on interpreting this law.

Some operators are taking the approach that being on the same page as an unlicensed operator on a US-facing affiliate site is sufficient while others are asking us to look for any affiliate site that promotes unlicensed operators anywhere in the world. That might sound like being overly-cautious but what casting that net wide will do is give the operator a historic record should that affiliate come to the table at a later date.

There are rumblings in other territories of course: Greece, Norway, Finland and Germany are all territories where we have been asked to scan but guidelines in many of these jurisdictions can often still be hard to interpret. No doubt the clouds will continue to clear away as 2019 progresses.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.