March Madness is upon us. Tomorrow is the first full day of games for the 2014 NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament and the deadline to submit the perfect bracket to get your hands on Warren Buffett’s $1 billion is fast approaching. (Note: That’s Warren Buffett, not Jimmy Buffett, as a friend first relayed to me.) But you know what else is valued at over a billion dollars? The marketing surrounding March Madness.
Whether it’s launching a new app or ad campaign, giving away free food or getting The Boss to headline a three-day concert, marketers are getting creative and going cross-media to make their marketing dollars count.
In a short segment (5:35) on Bloomberg Surveillance, marketing and consulting company Sapient’s CMO Bill Kanarick discusses why March Madness is “a case study in marketing”:
- Storyscaping = storyline (the narrative of a brand) + story system (how that story is delivered)
- Multi-screen experiences increase – not cannibalize – viewership
- March Madness 2013 achieved over $1 billion in advertising revenue and a 63 percent increase in viewership online
- Converting like –> want –> need
- The words the NCAA now owns (see: “March” and “bracketology”)
- Why college football bowl games don’t have the same effect
- The No. 1 key to March Madness marketing success