Keith Whyte
The continued expansion of the global gaming industry has created an ever-increasing need for responsible gaming and problem gambling resources.
For more than 25 years, Keith Whyte was at the forefront of those discussions as executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG). In January, Whyte pivoted to the private consulting sector, and then in early September he became a strategic RG adviser for FanDuel. This change has coincided with the rise of sweepstakes, prediction markets and other emerging sectors, and the high demand for RG initiatives.
Whyte spoke with GGB’s Jess Marquez at the NCLGS conference in July.
GGB: How did you get started down the RG path? What led you here?
Whyte: I got into the industry in ’95, and after three great years at the (American Gaming Association) started working with groups like the National Council on Problem Gambling. They received some funding to hire their first full-time executive director in 1998.
I applied because I thought it was a pretty key group, and they were silly enough to hire me, a 28-year-old kid with no administrative experience whatsoever. I was basically the sole employee. That was my start—a happy accident.
You were with the NCPG for nearly 30 years. How do you reflect on that time?
One big takeaway is that you can create material change. I’m lucky enough to have stuck with that one thing long enough so that, by the time I left, we had a budget of $5 million and 12 or 13 full-time employees. When I started, we had one full-time employee and the budget was less than $100,000.
Often we think about change in very short bursts. At most, these companies are thinking quarter by quarter, and that can really be discouraging. It’s hard to see progress, especially on a national issue like gambling or a national public health issue like problem gambling.
So that’s one benefit of that time. What it taught me is that you have to work on the short-term, the day-to-day, the week-to-week. But big social change requires a long amount of time.
In some ways it seems like we’re facing an impasse—RG is more well-known than ever but it still doesn’t seem to be landing with players. How do you view that dynamic?
The industry markets and bonuses people to do lots of things. Rarely are those same tools, techniques and frankly, cash, applied to RG. So everybody has to have or should have RG tools now. It’s a matter of incentivizing users. And again, the industry has written a playbook on incentivizing users. It’s simply a matter of applying that, and they’re masters at it.
It also points out the fact that gambling is still seen as a vice. There’s not really a social norm yet. 2018 is a good benchmark when you look at public approval of gambling shifting. When I got in the field in ’95, it was pretty much 50-50. But over time, the expansion of gambling has driven approval.
Generally speaking, gaming stakeholders are vehemently opposed to federal intervention. But for RG, a federal framework would arguably be the most helpful. What do you think about that idea?
Post-2018, gambling is undoubtedly a national issue. And now you’re seeing a lot more discourse in Congress. So prior to 2018, we’d go to Congress and they’d say, “Hey, that’s Iowa’s problem. That’s Nebraska’s problem.” Post-2018, there were almost no congressional doors that weren’t open to us. We would knock and say, “Hey, we’re here from NCPG,” and they’d say, “Oh my god, there’s ads everywhere on sports betting. Come on in, let’s talk.”
Whether the industry likes it or not, it’s now become a national issue. But I think there’s enormous opportunity there, because as problem gambling becomes a national public health issue, it cannot be solved on a state-by-state basis alone. You have to be able to exclude across state lines. Because we know gamblers cross state lines, advertising crosses state lines—the internet is a thing now.
There are several gray-area offerings on the rise, like sweepstakes, prediction markets, etc. A large portion of these players are in the 18-to-21 range—how important is it to keep innovating with RG?
I think it’s an axiom that whether or not something is legally classified as gambling does not matter when it meets the psychological definitions of gambling risk-taking. And forms of risk-taking need to have protections around them. But those protections are always going to be limited, especially with adolescents. That’s a time of risk-taking.
Teaching this next generation of kids how to make more informed choices, how to think critically about the marketing of everything that’s gamified, has got to be the solution. Every single sweepstakes and prediction market could voluntarily take the lessons from the online gambling space and apply them. They would build a better, more sustainable customer. They would reduce a lot of liability. But we can’t only rely on that.
