Advertising Gambling as Insurance

I guess it had to happen. Everyone’s realised that finance is a big gamble. So Paddy Power have started advertising their betting service as a kind of insurance against your holiday being ruined by an airline going bust.

Paddy Power Advert

The ad was placed in the Guardian travel supplement on Saturday.

More than half of me hates it. Less than half of me thinks it’s clever.

7 thoughts on “Advertising Gambling as Insurance”

  1. I’ve always done this with sporting results.

    “How much would I pay to see my side win. £50? Right. £50 on the other side to win”

    It does make Paddy Pwer come across as scumbags though.

  2. This is awful! I heard traders started rumours that their own were going to fail, so that their bets won.
    Satan’s spawn- the lot of em.

  3. Anyone foolish enough to book a flight with a company called “Wizz Air” quite frankly has it coming.

    Whilst this may be legal, one does has to question the morality of the situation.

  4. Calling them scum is a bit much, insurance and fixed odds gambling are pretty much one and the same thing.

    Paddy Power will take a bet on pretty much anything, so long as it’s not illegal. Looks to me like this is them going public after they lost their shirt taking bids on the collapse of XL, which was on the news.

    The scum in that case were people with insider knowledge of the state of XL and placed bets accordingly, not the bookie.

    At least we’re not living in the 17th century, when you could take out life insurance on a stranger…

  5. Mike wrote: At least we’re not living in the 17th century, when you could take out life insurance on a stranger…

    Ah but I bet you can take out a bet on them dying or not ;-)

  6. Do you remember when the US intelligence services started a website where you could bet on where the next terrorist attack would be?

    The thinking was that a pure market is the best way to predict events.

    Admirable devotion to free market economics, I say, especially in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.