Prospective Affiliates

As a member of the Bucky affiliate programme, it is your responsibility to ensure that your promotion methods are compliant with UK gambling regulations. The UKGC hold all operators to account for their affiliates’ marketing activities, and as such, we take your compliance seriously.

After applying to the programme, we will assess your traffic sources to ensure they are compliant. We have the following requirements and considerations for prospective affiliates:

• We require you to disclose all traffic sources where you will promote our brands.
• Your site(s) must include an 18+ age disclaimer and a link to a responsible gambling body (e.g. www.begambleaware.org). For social media affiliates, we require this information to be in the about/bio section of your profile, and in future posts that feature our brands.
• Social media posts featuring our brands must include #AD.
• If your site is not targeting the UK, we will require a link to a country-appropriate responsible gambling body.
• Your site must abide by the CAP code (especially the gambling section), mainly:
• The website must not be designed to appeal to children.
• Gambling must not be promoted as a way to guarantee profits, generate income, or become wealthy.
• Your site must not offer incentivised traffic.
• Your site must not enable non-age gated users to play free to play slots.
• Your site must not provide unauthorised access to copyrighted content.
• If you are running an affiliate network, we will require full disclosure of traffic sources so that we can ensure compliance.
• If you are media buying, you must evidence to us that you are working with appropriate traffic sources and have proper controls in place to ensure compliance with UK Gambling Regulations.
• We do not allow direct marketing of our brands (e.g email/SMS/phone/post).
• We do not allow promotion on:
  • Adult Networks
  • Sites with non-age gated free to play slots
  • Illegal Streaming Sites
  • Sites deemed particularly appealing to children
  • Pop-under or pop-up campaigns
  • ‘Advertorial’ style marketing
  • Snapchat, WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube (or other video services), Twitch (or other streaming services)

Once accepted to our programme, we have several requirements for how brands are promoted. Please see below for more information.

Active Affiliates – Promotion Requirements

We hold our affiliates to requirements set out by the UKGC and the ASA, and as such, we routinely check our members to ensure they are promoting our brands compliantly. This guide is designed to provide best practice for brand promotion and to give an insight into the type of things we wouldn’t consider compliant.

Failure to keep your promotion methods compliant and up-to-date can ultimately result in closing your account, so please ensure you read the following carefully.

1. All advertised offers need to have the key terms visible at the point of advertisement.

There are a few different ways to comply:

• Recommended – Using any of our banners in gif format will display the terms and be automatically updated.
• Showing the conditions in small print alongside the offer (these will need to be updated whenever the offer is changed).
• Have terms available through a drop-down – either on click or mouseover (these will need to be updated whenever the offer is changed). For this option, ensure that the terms are guaranteed to be seen by the customer before they click the CTA.

Alternatively, displaying no offer details will mean no terms and conditions are needed.

2. The full terms and conditions of any posted offer must be one click away.

• Recommended – Use your tracking link to link to the offer landing page.

Alternatively, not displaying a specific offer would allow you to link to the site homepage if you wish to.

This may not convert as well as linking to one of our bespoke landing pages, which we highly recommend.

Finally, you could host the full terms and conditions of the offer on your site/app. We wouldn’t recommend this, however, as our landing pages are updated automatically to the latest offers and terms and conditions.

3. Keep the ASA’s gambling code in mind when promoting.

There are many different regulations, but or particular note:

• You must not promote gambling as a way to achieve guaranteed profits, generate income, or become healthy.
• You must not promote out of date offers, as this can be considered as misleading advertising by the ASA

4. An 18+ age-disclaimer and a link to a responsible gaming body (we recommend https://www.begambleaware.org/) must be present on your site.

In general, our requirements for social media are the same as the above: Include salient terms, link to the full T&Cs (generally, the offer landing page) and comply with ASA regulations. The 18+ and begambleaware.org links must appear on the about us/bio page and in any posts that feature our brands. We also require the hashtag '#AD' to accompany every social media post promoting our brands so that it is clear to the end user that they are viewing an advertisement.

Can I use my own creative instead of creative hosted on the affiliate platform?
Ideally, we prefer affiliates to use the creative that we provide as we ensure this meets the Gambling Commission’s requirements and is fully compliant. However, if you have unique artwork that matches your domain branding, send all creative to your Affiliate Manager, to submit for review by our Compliance team. Once reviewed, your Affiliate Manager will notify you if the design is compliant.

Can I send your offers to our email database?
This, and any other form of direct marketing of our brands, is not permitted.