Another Kalshi ad popped up during my TikTok doomscroll today.
Two bros were talking about trading prediction markets into a podcast-mic setup. One had the golden doodle perm and the other looked like he’d just left an intramural basketball game to record a podcast. The whole thing appeared as if it had been filmed in the same studio every finance creator on the internet seems to use.
Honestly, it was enough to snap me back to reality; absolutely nothing about that ad organically belonged in my current perfectly curated-by-me TikTok feed, which consists of approximately 99% hilarious women creators, throwback emo songs, and dogs. They may want to revisit their ad targeting, but I digress.
What caught my attention was the realization that prediction markets have entered the phase where marketing is becoming just as interesting as the regulatory debate.
Most of the conversation around companies like Kalshi and Polymarket has focused on legality. State regulators have challenged them. The federal government has weighed in. Industry stakeholders have spent countless hours debating whether these products are closer to financial markets, sports betting, or something else entirely. Meanwhile, the marketing machine keeps humming along.
Which is what makes this interesting to me. The regulatory fight is still crawling forward at the speed of a government website update, but the marketing isn’t waiting for everyone to agree on what prediction markets are before customers are acquired. The ads are already running, the creator partnerships are already happening, and the audience is already being targeted.
And unlike sports betting, where years of public scrutiny have forced conversations around responsible gaming, audience targeting, and advertising standards, prediction markets don’t have an established marketing playbook yet. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t market, it just means the customer-acquisition engine is moving a lot faster than the conversation around what responsible customer acquisition should look like.
And the target audience is not difficult to spot: young men. The same demographic that has historically over-indexed in sports betting, fantasy sports, crypto, retail trading, and pretty much every other category that combines competition, risk, and the possibility of financial upside.
From a growth perspective, the targeting makes complete sense. This cohort is highly engaged online, comfortable transacting digitally, and already participate in adjacent categories that require many of the same behaviors prediction markets do. If I were running growth for a prediction market company, I’d probably be targeting them too.
What gives me pause is that the same demographic that makes sense from a customer-acquisition perspective also appears most frequently in research around gambling risk, speculative trading, and financial overconfidence. Research on online sports betting has consistently found that younger men are more likely to engage in higher-risk betting behaviors and studies of gambling-related harms continue to identify younger male consumers as a higher-risk demographic.
That doesn’t mean young men shouldn’t participate in prediction markets. It does mean that if an industry is actively marketing to a demographic that research already identifies as being more vulnerable to certain forms of risk-taking behavior, it’s reasonable to ask what responsibility comes with that. And if I were running one of these companies, I’d much rather be part of writing those standards than waiting for regulators, legislators, or public pressure to do it for me. Most of us would rather give ourselves a one a.m. curfew than keep coming home at four a.m. until someone else decides it’s 10 p.m.
The good news is that this isn’t necessarily at odds with growth. There is a tendency to frame consumer protection and customer acquisition as competing priorities, but that assumes short-term growth and long-term business success are the same thing.
We all know it’s almost always cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one. Customers who are familiar with a product, understand its risks, and use it responsibly tend to stick around longer than those who arrive because they were swept up in a hype cycle and disappear just as quickly.
Honestly, some of the ideas aren’t particularly revolutionary.
- Clearer disclosures around risk in creator and influencer campaigns.
- More balanced presentation of outcomes when discussing successful trades.
- Voluntary marketing standards published publicly by platforms.
- Additional scrutiny around audience targeting and campaign placement.
- Greater visibility of responsible trading tools within acquisition campaigns.
- Avoiding messaging that frames participation as easy money or guaranteed skill.
None of these ideas are very exciting. Nobody in marketing wakes up hoping to add friction to a campaign. But some friction exists for a reason.
As prediction markets continue to attract more users, more attention, and more advertising dollars, it seems reasonable that the conversation around responsible marketing should grow alongside them.
