Note: The author will moderate a webinar on the topic of this article, “Navigating the Uncharted Waters of EMS Providers in the Casino Industry,” on Tuesday, December 19, at 2:30 pm ET/11:30 am PT, hosted by Quick Custom Intelligence. Click the link for more information.
Casino operations are in the same category as child sexual exploitation, terrorism, illegal drug dealing, cyber warfare, pyramid schemes, and violent extremism. What? Not many believe that today, but apparently, a number of sanctimonious ESP companies do.
For you non-marketers, ESP is an acronym for Email Service Provider. In plain English, ESPs assist clients (including casinos) in crafting and distributing emails, social-media content, and text messages.
Astonishingly, more than 40 ESP firms have adopted a stance against casinos by including “gambling” on a list of prohibited activities. There’s a listing of those vendors below. You might be surprised by some of the names that have lumped our industry with the worst of the worst. They include category leader Mailchimp, alongside others like Constant Contact and Twilio. Even massive corporations like Salesforce, which offer ESP services as a secondary product, impose these restrictive policies.
Many casinos use these firms on a daily basis as a key component of their marketing efforts, making this backward-facing position even worse. These providers seem to practice selective discrimination without rhyme or reason. Several smaller local, regional and tribal casinos, which have been using these services for months, have recently received abrupt notices that they’re no longer welcome. Often, the notices arrive without advance warning, leaving these businesses in the lurch.
At the same time, despite their own written policies stating that they will not work with companies that “engage in or promote gambling or run a gambling operation,” some major firms (like Salesforce) continue to do thousands of dollars of business with corporate casino giants like Caesars Entertainment.
Mailchimp confirmed their prohibition to us in an email, but numerous inquiries to Salesforce have gone unanswered. (Here’s the link to Salesforce’s policy. Note item XVI.)
This stance may have been understandable in the 1950s, when much of the world believed Nevada was entirely under Mob control. In those days, the only socially acceptable forms of gambling were at racetracks, in church bingo halls, on Wall Street, or with the guy on the corner running numbers.
Fast forward to today. According to the American Gaming Association (AGA), “nearly half of all American adults (49%) participated in some form of gambling in the past year.” A significant portion of the public visited physical casinos or placed sports bets annually. Acceptance of casino gambling has reached 9 out of 10 (88%) Americans who believe “casino gambling is acceptable for themselves or others – a level that has remained consistent for over a decade.”
The AGA also cites some significant stats: Gaming contributed $53 billion in annual tax revenues across the country and provided 1.8 million jobs overall, which generated $104 billion in income.
While dozens of ESPs have jumped on the anti-gambling bandwagon, a few like iPost maintain a casino-friendly approach. They’ve even become an associate member of the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers (AGEM). iPost and some others have been sounding the alert about this issue.
CEO Cameron Kane says, “It’s insane. It’s absolutely insane. It makes no sense. We’ll get a call maybe once a week or every two weeks from somebody on one of these systems. They get flagged and they get a termination notice.”
He adds, “Several of these smaller casinos get just a few days to vacate and others are just shut down and told to find a new platform.”
That can leave a casino-marketing program missing in action for weeks as they look for a new solution. The team at iPost is now specializing in getting these clients back online quickly to minimize their downtime, since these termination notices are becoming more frequent and are hard to predict.
Andrew Cardno, CTO of Quick Custom Intelligence, highlighted the challenges this trend poses for analytic firms. “This was hard to believe at first, given how deeply ingrained digital-marketing platforms are in our business strategies. This change hit home when one of our clients was banned and another faced obstacles due to tribal sovereignty. These incidents aren’t isolated, but part of a worldwide trend that’s reshaping the way we operate across continents. If these cloud providers have the right to arbitrarily do this, why would we trust them with our business?”
He added, “In response to these evolving circumstances, it has become clear that our path forward lies in collaborating with reliable and trustworthy vendors.”
Julia Carcamo, of the marketing and branding firm Carcamo Associates, questioned the inclusion of gambling on the prohibited list. “I had to tell a client that the email platform he uses for his casinos is one of the platforms specifying that gambling messages aren’t allowed. While I can only guess that email service providers include gambling on their ‘forbidden industries’ lists as a holdover concern about the industry’s historical reputation, that concept is dated and invalid in 2023.” She did speculate on one possible reason. “Providers aiming to comply with international laws and regulations might choose to avoid the complexities by prohibiting gambling-related content.”
Notably, not all ESPs explicitly target “casinos” on their prohibited lists, but all refer to “gambling,” “gambling-related,” “affiliate gambling,” and/or similar words. In common usage, that certainly includes casinos. It would seem far more practical to simply ban “unlicensed gambling” if they were concerned with legal issues. But so far, that’s not the case with any of the firms listed below. And all have gambling on the same list as child porn, illegal drugs, terrorism, and the like.
For those concerned about these policies, here is a partial list of ESP firms to reach out to for clarifications on their positions: Active Campaign, Benchmark, Blueshift, Brevo, Cakemail, Campaign Monitor, Cheetah Digital, Constant Contact, CovertKit, CreateSend, Doppler, Elastic Email, Emailchef, ExpertSender, GreenArrow, HubSpot, iContact, Keap, Klaviyo, Liveclicker, Mad Mimi, Mail Blaze, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Mailmunch, MAP Digital, Marigold, Maropost, MessageGears, Moosend, MyEmma (Emma), Omnisend, Robly, Sailthru, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Seligent, Sendlane, SendPulse, SocketLabs, and Twilio. If they’re not forthcoming, ask to see their published “prohibited list,” which is generally buried deep within their websites.
Many suggest that casino clients proactively contact their ESP vendors to determine their stance. If these vendors indeed intend to discriminate against the casino industry, it may be prudent to explore alternative providers before facing unanticipated and arbitrary bans.
