1. Leveraging March Madness for
Brand Advertising
By Terence Yee
Sports Marketing 430
April 29th, 2015
2. What is March Madness?
“March Madness” is the nickname for the NCAA Men’s
College Basketball Tournament, held in March.
The tournament is consisted of 68 seeded teams, who
compete to play for a National Championship title.
3. What’s the Madness?
Millions of participants fill out a tournament bracket to pick who they
think will win and advance.
-Every year, underdog teams with a lower “seed” happen to beat a
higher seed, resulting in an upset. This results in brackets being
ruined, or being “busted”. The phrase of these upsets occurring,
refers to “March Madness.”
4. Synopsis
The name of my article is called Social Media’s role in the March Madness marketing game, written
by a Marketing company called Newbrand.
There was more television advertising money spent on the 2015 March Madness tournament than in
the Super Bowl. AT&T was the company leader with $62 million spent during the three week
nationally televised event.
The article did mention the objective of advertisers creating an integrated advertising platform by
adding social media campaigns with television commercials.
Brands that integrated basketball related content with their products into their campaigns achieved
the most success. Such brands included Coca-Cola, Dove, Capital One, and Reeses.
6. Relation to Class
This article talks about two types of advertising methods, which is a
component of the promotional mix.
-Television- is a media medium that can generate coverage for a large
market, however is expensive.
-Social media- a set of channels targeted at forming a massive community of
participants to collaborate.
7. Analysis
-Brands that want to get the most Return on Investment from advertising campaigns should
really look to leverage social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and
Snapchat. Especially because social media is becoming very relevant among our generation.
From a brand’s perspective, advertising in a setting such as March Madness is all from a
Business strategy. They do this in order to 1) Increase market share and 2) Stimulate call-to-
action decisions to buy their product. This is an interesting difference from the fan’s
perspective, which March Madness may be just a form of entertainment.
-The article mentioned, “If your brand isn’t being talked about on social media, you aren’t
successful.” Through various social media metrics available, you can determine which brand
is really influencing people.
Lastly, social media is advantageous because of it’s ability to reach more people, and the
flexible ability to make adjustments to your campaign based on trends.
