Sport is made for betting

Another broker says sell, another week of dreadful unplanned site outages, another marketing campaign criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority.... It's not looking good for Betfair shareholders, now trading in the 850p range, getting dangerously close to half their market peak of 1610p just a few months ago. The Cricket World Cup is underway and Cheltenham's just around the corner - a few folks in the ivory tower will be praying for some record figures, otherwise there has to be some blood spilling from the board room soon as the value of the company continues to slide.

You seriously have to wonder where the brains department of Betfair have disappeared to. A TV campaign based around the theme 'cut out the middleman'. Look it up in the dictionary - Betfair are the irrefutable definition of the word: mid·dle·man     [mid-l-man] –noun, plural -men. 1. a person who plays an economic role intermediate between producer and retailer or consumer. 2. a person who acts as an intermediary. So what else do Betfair do then?? The Advertising Standards Authority yesterday banned the ad after a series of complaints, stating that the advert was misleading and conveniently forgot to mention they take out a commission.

I'm glad this happened because if the wowsers got this one kicked off TV, then humour would never be allowed in advertising ever again. ASA dismisses Paddy Power ad complaints The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has cleared a TV advertisement for Irish bookmaker Paddy Power that showed a game of football being played between two teams of blind men which ended with a cat being kicked into a tree, despite more than 1,000 complaints from viewers - one of the highest ever recorded by the ASA. The TV ad showed a game of football being played by two teams of blindfolded men, using a ball which had a bell inside it. One player kicked the ball off the pitch and a cat, wearing a bell on its collar, ran on to the pitch. The referee was about to blow his whistle, when one of the men was shown taking a kick and a thud and a loud cat's meow was then heard - although no contact between the player and the cat was shown on screen (and the cat was shown to be fine afterwards, albeit hi...