Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security WALL OF SHAME 68 keep a 15-year-old boy off of a porn site. How do you prevent an adult from seeing an ad on a public webpage? But maybe that’s not the point of all this. Maybe the Dutch government knows full well it’s impossible? Maybe the Dutch just don’t give a crap because they know that since it can’t be proven, they are essentially shutting down internet gambling advertising for good? After all, that’s pretty much the same exact approach that they took with television and radio ads for gambling. They banned all of it. And why? Because they were “untargeted,” meaning, they couldn’t say for sure that children or underaged people were not going to see them. They could not PROVE their ads were not going to be viewed by people under a certain age. In fact, the Netherlands won’t even allow billboards for gambling advertisements, indoors or outdoors in any public area. The point here? Watch your back. Because if you thought things were crazy in the U.K., here come the Dutch. Someone needs to tell them that when it comes to being ridiculous, it’s not a competition between them and the U.K. Welcome to the club, Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security! Producing a Wall of Shame article for each issue of the GPWA Times Magazine is really quite simple. Heck, we should probably be “grateful” for the fact that we work in an industry that bleeds ridiculousness from every corner of the planet. For this issue, the preposterousness hails from the Netherlands, where the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security stated back in August that gambling operators must be able to PROVE their digital adverts cannot reach people under the age of 24. This, of course, begs the question, “How on earth are they supposed to do that?” We have been involved in this industry for decades and still don’t know of any way to prove 100%, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any age group can either view or not view a webpage advertisement. I mean, you can geo-block, you can put up paywalls, but how do you stop a 22-year-old from looking at a banner or reading an advertorial? Sure, website owners could falsify their statistics, but how exactly does that fall back on gambling advertisers? Hell, they can’t even G P W A t i m e s . o r g
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