Advertising

8 September 2024

By Frank Scoblete

You can’t watch a sporting event or single game on television or listen to such on the radio or on streaming services or even watch your favorite television show, even sweet little sit-coms about our wonderful and often dopey families, without seeing commercials for online, on land, and sea casinos.

There are also plenty of commercials for land-based and even ocean-based casinos. What gives?

Do any of you remember when casino gambling didn’t exist in such profusion on the boob tube? Indeed, the National Football League and major league baseball openly told viewers they would have nothing to do with gambling. Just ask Pete Rose.

[Please note: Boob tube is the moniker that folks gave to television in the earlier days, the days of my youth. Books and deeply thought-about plays were the height of civilization. And who were the folks who watched television? Come on, you guessed it.]

I have somewhat mixed feelings about casino advertising. Obviously, I am all for casinos. I’ve been writing about them for four decades. I have spent almost forty years playing in them all over the country and in many other countries.

I have no problem with the casinos advertising their wears either. Heck, my books are advertised and most of them are indeed about casino games and my adventures in the temples of Lady Luck.

So, what bothers me? That’s the question I ask myself when I view the legion of commercials.

Here it is (and I don’t know how to fix it either): People are too darn happy in these commercials! (Maybe people are too darn happy in most commercials.)

I know that what I just said sounds ridiculous but just hang out in the casinos as I have done and you know not everyone is slapping fives, or jumping up and down in the thrill of victory or howling at the moon like a just-released werewolf.

Sometimes the casino experience can be awful. Yes, you do get those moments of ecstasy that are shown on the tube but you also get the moments of agony. It’s part of the package. That would be a good title for a book, “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”

Instead, the advertisements show at the bottom of the screen the fact that some players do indeed go overboard. People who are speed readers can actually read the warning.

I think somewhere in the commercial should be a caution that players should bring “fun money” or such a thing in order to play. “Go to movies? Come to the casinos!” Something such as that. “Keep your head about you and go for the gold!” Maybe something like this?

Or maybe I am just too aware of all the “boobs” out there who need a good shaking because they don’t have their playing lives in order. Maybe this is true of just about any human activity – some people just don’t have it straight. Enjoy candy? “But you do weigh four-hundred pounds Big Bill.”

Okay, so maybe I am wrong. But somehow I just can’t see Ozzie Nelson (from the show “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”) figuring out the racing lines while he’s reading a newspaper. It just doesn’t fit with my world view. Now, my uncles? That’s a whole other story.

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Frank Scoblete’s books are available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries, and bookstores.