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It may have seemed like a cool idea at the time: Go after Virginia's popular slogan and change out a word. "Virginia is for Lovers" becomes "Virginia is for Bettors" as a result of the new online gambling legality.
But piggybacking off this "new" slogan apparently won't bode well for VirginiaIsForBettors.com. This is the website developed by online gambling mega affiliates the Gambling.com Group.
Virginia Commonwealth Senate Minority Leader Tommy Norment heard the phrase bastardized as part of a radio advertisement and decided he was going to put a stop to this.
“Frankly, it annoyed me,” Norment told a Senate gambling subcommittee last month as originally reported by the Virginia Mercury’s Graham Moomaw. “We’ve spent a lifetime trying to market ‘Virginia is for Lovers.’ I just felt it was trespassing on it.”
Norment is looking to pass legislation that would force violators using the term "Virginia Is For Bettors" to pay a civil penalty as high as $50,000. It doesn't take a genius to realize that this penalty would apply to the folks at Gambling.com.
The official statement from Gambling.com Group's CEO Charles Gillespie on the news:
“Virginia’s state legislature made it clear that Virginia is for bettors when they legalized sports betting in April 2020 with a strong regulatory regime that offered consumers a choice of online sportsbooks. We will of course respect the will of Virginia's lawmakers.”
The Gambling.com Group won't be too hurt. They own plenty of websites designed specifically to target each state that has legalized sports betting. It's easy enough for the publicly traded firm to pull the VirginiaIsForBettors site and switch to a new one.
Of course this whole ordeal seems like a bit of Much Ado About Nothing in our eyes.
“As much as anything else, I did this to send a message,” Norment said last week. “And I think I got their attention.”
Norment is intent on seeing the bill through House passage in the remaining weeks of the 2022 General Assembly and having Gov. Glenn Youngkin sign it into law.
“If there is another entity out there that might think about trespassing on our tourism marketing, I want this to make them think again,” he said.
- Gilbert Horowitz, Gambling911.com
