“Bet on Kendall” shows a smarter starting point for marketing

One of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing right now is relevance. With the rise of AI, teams are creating more content than ever, but much of it struggles to connect because it’s built from internal assumptions instead of real audience signals.  

Playbooks that most marketers are used to—brainstorm, create, distribute—is starting to break down. Not because execution is worse, but because audiences are harder to engage with something that feels manufactured from the start.  

Take the “Kardashian Kurse” for example. This is something that’s been highly spoken about among sports fans and on the internet in general. So, when launching their new campaign, instead of starting from a blank page, Fanatics Sportsbook’s “Bet on Kendall” campaign built on an idea that already existed in culture and turned it into something people can interact with. 

Starting with what people recognize.

At the center of the campaign is the “Kardashian Kurse”—a long-running internet narrative about athletes underperforming after being linked to Kendall Jenner. Because they took from an existing, popular internet theory, Fanatics didn’t need to explain it or reframe it from scratch which did a lot of the work upfront. 

The campaign acknowledges that the audience didn’t need context, there was already an existing point of view they could get on board with.  

The idea became something you can act on.

The campaign also gave audiences a way to participate by betting with or against Jenner’s Super Bowl pick in the Fanatics Sports App. So, instead of watching and scrolling past, people were able to engage and become part of the story.  

The campaign moved from something people passively looked at to something they could actively do. 

Distribution was built into the concept.  

The campaign extended far beyond a Super Bowl Spot. It showed up in social content, short-form cutdowns, and out-of-home activations. But also, it spread because people already had opinions about the idea behind it so the conversation existed before the campaign even launched.  

What B2B marketers should take from this.

Most B2B marketing is still built around original creation. While this can be powerful, we are now marketing in an environment where audiences are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content out there and starting an idea from scratch can be the hardest part in getting people to engage.  

This campaign showed a different approach by starting with something that already had traction and building from there. 

1. Start with real conversations instead of only internal ideas.
   The strongest part of this campaign existed before the brand got involved. B2B marketers can generate ideas from sales calls, customer questions, community discussions, and industry debates to help launch campaigns that are immediately recognizable.
   Ideas that originate from real conversations tend to resonate faster because they’re already validated.  

3. Familiarity reduces friction.
   When people recognize the premise, they engage more quickly because they don’t need to understand the context, they already have it. B2B messaging often introduces new frameworks or language, which can slow down engagement.  
4. Give your audience a role in the idea.
   The Fanatics campaign invited audiences to participate which spread their message and campaign even further. So how can B2B marketers get their audience in on the action?
   Interactive content is one way to get audiences to engage, but it needs to go beyond static quizzes or gated calculators. The strongest examples are tied to real decisions, opinions, or moments your audience is already thinking about. 

Opinion-driven discussions:
Instead of publishing a take, invite your audience into it. Ask them to weigh in on a controversial industry shift, vote on what they would do in a scenario, or react to a strong POV. This works especially well on platforms like LinkedIn where conversation drives reach.  

Decision-based tools:
Build simple tools that help your audience make a choice. This could be a pricing calculator, a “choose your strategy” flow, or even a quick self-assessment tied to a real problem they’re facing. The key is making it useful, not just interactive for the sake of it.  

Live or real-time participation:
Polls, AMAs, webinars with audience input, or even Slack/Discord-style community conversations. The more immediate the interaction, the more invested people become.  

Scenario-based content:
“What would you do?” style content based on real situations—budget cuts, vendor selection, campaign performance, etc. This mirrors how people actually think through decisions internally. 

When people can engage with an idea, they’re more likely to remember it, respond to it, and share it. More importantly, they start to see themselves inside the narrative you’re building.

4. Build distribution into the idea itself.
   One of the biggest advantages of the “Bet on Kendall” campaign is that it doesn’t depend on distribution to work—it benefits from it.  The idea naturally lends itself to sharing because people already have a reaction to it. In B2B distribution is often treated as a separate phase. But the campaigns that travel further tend to have distribution baked in from the beginning. They’ve designed with the audience’s behavior in mind.  That can look like asking different questions early on: 
   • Would this spark a reaction or POV? 
   • Does this connect to something that people are already discussing? 
   • Is there a reason for someone to bring this into a conversation? 

   When the answer is yes, distribution becomes less about pushing content out and more about giving people something worth passing along 

The takeaway.

“Bet on Kendall” works because it meets people in a place where attention already exists and gives them a way to engage with it. 

A lot of marketing still assumes attention needs to be earned from zero. If the idea is strong enough, people will stop, pay attention, and engage. In reality, audiences are already paying attention to specific conversations, trends, and ideas. The challenge is finding a way to connect to those moments in a way that feels natural. 

For B2B marketers, this changes how ideas should be approached. Instead of asking, “What should we create?” a more useful question is, “Where is our audience already engaged, and how can we add to that?” 

When an idea builds on something your audience already cares about, it doesn’t have to work as hard to earn attention—and it has a much better chance of holding it.