I just got back from Fanatics Fest in New York, and I need to say something uncomfortable: a sports memorabilia convention delivered a better marketing masterclass than any B2B event I've attended in 25 years. That includes Inbound. That includes Dreamforce.
I was there supporting one of our clients, Joe Hollywood, who was exhibiting. I walked in as a fan. I walked out with a notebook full of lessons for every B2B marketing team.
Here's what I saw, and what you should steal from it.
If you've ever bought anything online for your favorite team or college, you probably bought it from Fanatics. They're the world's largest retailer of sports merchandise and memorabilia, past and present. Fanatics Fest is their annual convention: four days at the Javits Center where fans celebrate their teams, buy merchandise, meet athletes, and immerse themselves in sports culture.
Over 400 celebrities and athletes were there. I saw Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Rob Gronkowski, and Gary Vee. I watched the entire Knicks team walk the aisle with Spike Lee holding up the trophy. Every league built interactive experiences: drive a race car at the F1 booth, kick a soccer ball at FIFA, hit the bag at UFC, jump off the top rope at the wrestling activation.
Fans of every age, from toddlers to retirees. And an energy level I have never once felt at a B2B trade show.
The thing that struck me first was the raw energy. We talk about "immersive customer experience" in B2B constantly. Fanatics actually built one.
Whether you were two years old or fifty, there was something designed for you. Not for the brand. For you.
Now look at your last event. Product features. Roadmap sessions. Thought leadership panels. All of it has a role. But be honest: how much of your event programming exists to excite your customer, and how much exists to serve your marketing calendar?
Fans love their teams because those teams make them feel something. Most B2B marketers never even ask what would make their customers feel anything at all.
Every attendee bought a ticket, between $15 and $200 depending on the pass. Then, once inside, they kept spending: cards, apparel, autographs, premium experiences. People paid to enter, paid to engage, and paid to go deeper. Each purchase reinforced the connection instead of exhausting it.
Millions of dollars changed hands over one weekend, and the buyers were thrilled about it.
Ask yourself the question Debbie asked me on the show: can you imagine your customers saying "let me pay you to experience your brand"? B2B may never fully replicate what sports and entertainment can do. But as inspiration, it should force the question: what would you have to build for a buyer to gladly open their wallet just to spend time with you?
I've been to Javits more times than I can count. This was the first time I ever saw multi-floor booths. Exhibitors built structures with second stories, VIP lounges upstairs, whole houses on the show floor.
We had designed a booth for our client that I was proud of. And we still thought in two dimensions: here's our 20x20, how do we maximize the square footage. It never occurred to us to go vertical.
That principle extends far beyond physical space. We assume an email has to look a certain way, a direct mail piece has to look a certain way, a social post has to fit a template. Why? Same footprint, same budget, completely different result if you change the dimension you're building in.
Our client Joe Hollywood broadcast live from the booth for 15 hours straight, every day. But the moment that stuck with me was simple: he saw a kid walking by and said, "Hey, want to come on the show?"
The kid lit up. The parents started filming. Within minutes, 50 kids were lined up to get on the program, get their product opened live, and get an autograph. A viral moment inside a moment, created on instinct.
We obsess over gimmicks to drive booth traffic: car giveaways, badge scans, swag. Joe didn't need any of it because he is genuinely in tune with his audience. That's the uncomfortable part for B2B: we sit on mountains of customer data, and most of us still aren't intimate with our customers. Some tech companies don't even like their customers. They like the revenue.
Data tells you what happened. Intimacy tells you what to do in the moment.
The experience hit every sense from every direction. You watched content being recorded live, then saw that same content hit your Instagram and YouTube feeds in real time. Influencers, podcasters, and athletes moved through the floor with entourages, and the physical and digital experiences fed each other continuously.
Our client ran the same loop: broadcasting live on Whatnot while physically interacting with the crowd, cameras facing both directions, so if you stopped to watch the show you were ON the show, then clipped and pushed back out to social in real time.
That's an omnichannel flywheel. One experience, one identity, every channel amplifying the others. Most B2B teams run channels in parallel silos and call it integrated marketing.
Here's what might be the most important observation of the weekend. Across four days, hundreds of brands, and 400 celebrities, AI was barely mentioned at all.
The entire event was authentic: real fans, real athletes, real emotion, real money. In a year when every B2B conversation is saturated with AI, the most commercially effective marketing event I've seen ran entirely on human connection.
Authenticity isn't a content strategy. It's the connection itself.
Debbie closed the episode with the right question: you're a CMO, you heard all this, what do you tell your team Monday morning?
Here's my answer: "I want our customers to become raving fans. Let's pretend we're a professional sports team. What do we start doing differently?"
Start with the customer, not the marketer. Ask them directly: if I could hand you an amazing experience on a silver platter, what would it look like? Then build that, and stop programming events around your feature releases.
What is Fanatics Fest? Fanatics Fest is the annual fan convention run by Fanatics, the world's largest sports merchandise retailer. Held at the Javits Center in New York, it combines athlete appearances, interactive league activations, collectibles, and live entertainment across four days.
What can B2B marketers learn from Fanatics Fest? Five things: design experiences entirely around the customer, create experiences worth paying for, break dimensional assumptions in your marketing formats, build real customer intimacy rather than relying on data alone, and connect physical and digital channels into one real-time flywheel.
Why does experiential marketing work better than traditional B2B events? Because it starts with emotion. Fans show up already caring, and the experience deepens that connection. Most B2B events start with the vendor's agenda and try to manufacture interest through content. Emotion first, education second.
How do you turn customers into fans? Ask customers what an ideal experience looks like, deliver moments designed for them rather than for your pipeline, show up authentically, and treat every interaction as part of one continuous relationship rather than a campaign touchpoint.
Jeff Pedowitz is President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group. Catch the full conversation with Debbie Qaqish on this week's episode of Revenue Marketing Raw.