The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a coordinated advertising campaign by Midnite after receiving 125 complaints.
It covers five advertisements – two TV ads, two video ads and a radio ad – which ran during April and May 2026.
Midnite’s ads depicted characters encountering a barrage of minor, everyday technological failures, such as a malfunctioning supermarket scanner, a broken vending machine and a faulty hotel key card.
In the visual ads, the mounting frustration of the characters was represented by veins visibly pulsating on their heads.
Each ad ended with a song saying: “We can’t fix the rest, but our betting app [or casino app] is actually pretty good”.
The ASA concluded that this campaign portrayed mounting stress and then gambling was implied as a relief, painting it as a coping mechanism.
It breached a variety of codes and was deemed to be socially irresponsible and potentially harmful.
Midnite refuted these claims, saying that the ads “were based on the familiar experience of everyday technology not working as expected”, and contrasting this to their “reliable” and “well-functioning” app.
The UK-focused operator also stressed how much it focused on responsible gambling messages before the campaign went live.
However, it seems the ASA has not budged on its decision to remove the ads.
“We acknowledged Midnite’s view that they believed the ads focused on the user experience, quality and functionality of their app,” the ASA’s statement read.
“However, whether or not the reliability of gambling apps was a known issue, we considered that consumers were likely to understand those claims in context not solely as statements about product quality, but also as implying that turning to the app offered some kind of relief from the frustrations that were the focus of the ads.
“Further, although the ads stated that Midnite could not “fix” those situations, we considered the juxtaposition between the repeated frustrations and the final reference to the app was likely to convey that using the app was a way to move on from, or forget about, those frustrations in some way.
“We therefore considered the ads suggested that gambling could alleviate stressful situations or frustration and could therefore function as a coping mechanism.”
Midnite stung after marketing expansion
It is not the first time that Midnite has been stung by the ASA before, and it was never an impossibility given the company’s focus on ramping up its marketing strategies in recent times.
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube users may have become familiar with the company’s adverts throughout 2026.
In April, the operator sent its betting app to space in a unique marketing campaign that drew attention, while back on planet earth, it seems to be putting a lot of effort into making its presence felt in the EFL Championship, gaining sponsorship deals with Wolverhampton Wanderers, Southampton, Middlesbrough and Sheffield United.
Midnite’s recent prevalence may be in some part down to the $35m (£26.9m) funding round it raised at the start of the year.
This was intended to “scale operations, accelerate development of best-in-class products and support international expansion”.
That scaling has certainly been seen, though there has been no announcement of international expansion thus far.
Midnite has continuously positioned itself as a technology-led, “new kid on the block” type bookmaker, making its reasoning for the marketing campaign a little more justified.
This still, however, breached the ASA’s rules, meaning the consistently-growing business still has work to do to adhere to advertising regulations in its home market…
