How prediction markets rebranded the bet and what it tells us about belief

Polymarket and Kalshi have built billion-pound brands on a deceptively simple idea: that a wager is really a window into the truth. It is the most interesting branding story of this World Cup, and one of the most instructive we have seen in years.

There is a version of the prediction markets story that is entirely about finance. Contract structures, regulatory jurisdiction, trading volumes measured in the billions. It is a real story, and a genuinely fascinating one. However, it is not the story that explains why, during the world’s biggest football tournament, two companies most people could not have named eighteen months ago are suddenly everywhere. On the pitch-side hoardings. In the ad breaks. Alongside the pundits talking about the games.

That story is about brands and it is about one of the boldest acts of category repositioning we have watched in three decades as a branding agency. In their own language, Polymarket and Kalshi are not asking you to place a bet. They are inviting you to trade on the truth. Whether that reframing is brilliant, dangerous, or both is a question worth sitting with. Because the mechanics of how they did it are a masterclass, and the risk of what happens when a brand outruns its substance is a cautionary tale.

A wager, repositioned as information

The category is, on its face, close to sports betting and event gambling. But neither brand describes itself that way, and the difference is not accidental. The vocabulary is financial throughout. You are a trader, not a punter. You buy an event contract, you do not place a bet. The number on screen is not odds, it is a probability, a live reading of what the crowd collectively believes. Kalshi does the whole job in three words on its posters, trade on anything. Polymarket’s founder has described the platform as close to the most accurate instrument humanity currently has for reading the present.

This is strategy before style, the principle we return to again and again. It is brand positioning doing the heavy lifting long before a single advertisement was made, because both companies first made a decision about what business they were in, and it was not the betting business. It was the truth business. Everything downstream, the tone, the partnerships, the World Cup spend, flows from that one strategic choice. It is worth pausing on how deliberate it is. The same activity, described two ways, produces two completely different brands. One sounds like a bookmaker. The other sounds like Bloomberg.

Two brands, one World Cup, two very different playbooks

The tournament has become the clearest side-by-side study of brand strategy you could ask for, because the two market leaders have approached the same moment in almost opposite ways.

Polymarket went cultural. Its first global brand campaign, Questions Are Everything, launched to coincide with the tournament, voiced by the record producer Rick Rubin and built around a single idea: that the people who keep asking questions are the ones who uncover the answers. The hero film, Flags, set to Kanye West’s Runaway and opening on fifteen national flags each tied to a live market, reportedly passed thirty million views inside a day. Tellingly, it leans on music and emotion rather than football, with localised versions rolling out for Argentina, Portugal, Senegal, Britain and France as the bracket narrowed. This is brand-building in the classic sense. You buy your way into the culture, not just the category.

Kalshi went the other way, towards proximity and endorsement. Stadium hoardings, athlete ambassadors including Luka Modrić, a tie-up with the Men in Blazers football media brand, and deals stitched to national football associations. When it could not justify FIFA’s asking price for official sponsorship, reported at around 150 million dollars, it found a side door. For a fraction of that, reportedly near 20 million dollars, it co-branded alongside ADI Predictstreet, the little-known, Abu Dhabi-backed firm that FIFA had already named its official prediction market partner. Earlier, lacking the rights to the tournament’s name, Kalshi had simply called it the World Soccer Cup. A small but revealing example of a brand working around a constraint rather than being stopped by it.

And here is the lesson buried in the fixture list. ADI Predictstreet had the official status, the logos in the stadiums, the FIFA seal. It also had, by several accounts, almost no traders. Some matches drew less than a hundred dollars of activity, while the very same games saw millions flow through Polymarket and Kalshi. Official status, without a brand that people recognise and trust, converts to very little. It is the same point we have made before, about our internal culture work for McDonald’s and about every business that mistakes visibility for meaning. Being seen is not the same as being chosen. A logo is not a brand.

The language is the strategy

Look closely at how these companies actually speak and you find two registers running at once, both serving the same goal.

The first is the language of legitimacy. Truth. Information. Markets. Accuracy. Signal. It is a vocabulary borrowed wholesale from finance and journalism, and it is doing something specific. It asks you to see a prediction as a public good rather than a private flutter. When a platform’s price is quoted in a news report as though it were a poll, the repositioning is complete. The bet has become data.

The second register is almost the opposite. The irreverent, meme-heavy, deliberately provocative voice both brands adopt on social media, aimed squarely at a young, very online, mostly male audience, with a growing push to reach women too. It looks like chaos. It is not. It is the same confidence expressed in a different key, the tonal equivalent of a challenger brand rolling its eyes at the establishment. High-minded on the billboard, irreverent in the feed, and underneath both, the same claim: we are the ones who see clearly.

That is skilful brand-building. It is also the point at which a careful observer starts asking harder questions.

So is it data, or is it gambling? The honest answer is both

This is the question the marketing is designed to soften, and it deserves a straight, even-handed answer, because there is a real case on each side.

The case for prediction markets as a healthy use of data is not trivial. When people back their beliefs with real money, they tend to be more honest than when they answer a pollster, and a well-populated market can gather scattered knowledge into a single, constantly updating probability. Because these markets are peer-to-peer, with no house setting the odds, their defenders argue they sit structurally closer to a futures exchange than to a bookmaker. On heavily traded questions, the resulting prices can be quick, sharp, and at times more accurate than pundits or polls. For journalists, analysts and decision-makers, that is a genuinely useful signal, and a new one.

The case against is just as real. A probability is only as trustworthy as the process that settles it, and settlement is exactly where these platforms strain. Polymarket’s reliance on a crowd-based resolution mechanism has produced disputed outcomes and, in at least one high-profile instance around events in Venezuela, a refusal to pay out that no exchange-grade instrument should generate. The wisdom of the crowd also depends on there being some independent way to check the crowd was right, and for one-off, unrepeatable events that check often does not exist. There is the self-fulfilling prophecy problem, where a widely cited market price begins to shape the very outcome it claims only to measure. There is insider trading risk, sharpened by how specific some contracts are. And there is a human cost that no amount of financial vocabulary erases: during this very tournament, one trader reportedly lost more than eleven million dollars in ten days. Regulators are unconvinced by the framing too. In the United States the platforms are fighting state after state that views them as unlicensed sports betting, and one attorney general has argued bluntly that these products are built to be addictive and fall hardest on the young and the low-paid.

Both things are true at once. A prediction market can be a legitimately useful information tool and a form of gambling wearing the clothes of finance. The branding does not resolve that tension. It simply chooses which half of it you notice first.

The detail UK readers should notice

Here is what makes this a particularly instructive case from where we sit. For most people reading this in Britain, neither Polymarket nor Kalshi is actually available. Both geoblock UK users, neither hold a Gambling Commission licence, and the UK treats these products as betting under existing law, with the Financial Conduct Authority’s longstanding ban on binary options to retail consumers sitting squarely in the way.

And yet you know the names. You have seen the advertising. The brands have travelled far ahead of the product, into markets they cannot legally serve, on the strength of a cultural moment and a compelling story. That is a striking demonstration of what a brand can achieve on its own. It is also a quiet warning. Awareness without access, and a story that runs ahead of what the substance can currently support, is a fragile kind of success. Brand can open a door. It cannot, by itself, hold it open.

The question that matters most

We are not here to tell you whether to trade on a football match. We are here because this is, underneath the volumes and the lawsuits, a brand story, and one that sharpens a principle we have spent thirty years testing.

Language can reposition a category. A confident, coherent brand can persuade an entire market to see a familiar thing in an unfamiliar and more flattering light, and Polymarket and Kalshi have wielded that power with rare skill. But the lesson we keep returning to is the one about what happens next. A brand can lead with a story, yet the substance has to be able to bear its weight, or the gap between what you say you are and what you actually deliver is eventually exposed. Trust, the kind that survives a disputed payout or a bad week with the regulators, cannot be prompted into existence or bought with a stadium hoarding. It is earned, consistently, over time.

So the question we would put to any brand watching these two companies with a little envy is not how do we make our category sound more exciting. It is the harder one. Is what we actually do good enough to stand behind the story we want to tell about it?

The brands that can answer yes are the ones worth building. That, in the end, is what thirty years has taught us. And we are still learning.

If you are thinking about how your brand shows up in a fast-moving category, and whether the story you tell is matched by the substance beneath it, we would be glad to talk.

Get in touch at [email protected] or uncover our world at underscore.co.uk.