5W, the AI Communications Firm, released The Gaming & Gambling Earned Media Playbook 2026: Building Position Before the Market Opens — a strategic guide for sports betting operators, online gaming platforms, and land-based casino brands navigating the next 24 months of U.S. state legalization.

The playbook draws on 5W’s Gaming Trust Index 2026, the first annual study to systematically analyze marketing spend allocation and brand credibility outcomes across U.S. sports betting, online gaming, and land-based casino markets. The Index analyzed $3.9 billion in tracked U.S. gambling marketing spend across more than 47,000 articles.

The misallocation, in numbers:

• 36% of spend ($1.42 billion) on television

• 13% ($520 million) on celebrity and athlete partnerships

• 2.3% ($90 million) on earned media and PR

• 1.5% ($60 million) on responsible gambling programs

• The two lowest-investment categories generate the highest documented return on brand credibility of any channel analyzed

The state pipeline window: U.S. online gaming generated $12.8 billion in GGR in 2025 across seven legal states, with New York, Illinois, Indiana, and Virginia in active legislative consideration for online gaming, plus continued sports betting expansion in 10 or more additional states.

The playbook documents that the 2021 Michigan online gaming launch produced the cleanest case study in the category: operators with pre-existing earned media presence in the state achieved faster initial user acquisition than operators that relied solely on advertising at market open — and the pattern held across operator scale.

The playbook also re-anchors the September 26, 2024 SEC enforcement action against DraftKings as the defining Regulation FD case for the gaming industry. DraftKings paid a $200,000 civil penalty after its outside public relations firm posted material nonpublic information on the personal X and LinkedIn accounts of the company’s CEO, one week before Q2 2023 earnings. Neither account had been designated as a Regulation FD-compliant disclosure channel. The enforcement order extended responsibility to PR firms acting on behalf of the issuer.

“The U.S. gambling industry has spent five years and billions of dollars buying awareness. What it has not bought, and cannot buy with the same allocation, is credibility. The operators that win the next 24 months of state legalization will not be the ones with the biggest television budget at launch. They will be the ones who built earned media presence, regulatory standing, and responsible gambling credibility in the 18 months before the market opened. AI search is now the gatekeeper for how regulators, investors, journalists, and consumers form a view of every public gaming operator on Earth. The brands that treat that as the central communications shift of the decade will own the next five years of this industry,” said Ronn Torossian, Founder and Chairman of 5W.

The playbook prescribes a seven-step 90-day plan covering earned media footprint mapping against the state pipeline, marketing mix rebalancing, Reg FD workflow design, responsible gambling content programs, creator and athlete partnership restructuring, AI visibility audits across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, and brand credibility measurement frameworks.