Viva’s Blog: Why we love March Madness

There’s a reason the 2015 NCAA tournament just scored its highest viewership and social media engagement in over twenty years: it hooked their audience.

The NCAA National Men’s basketball tournament reinforces a sport’s connection with die-hard fans while simultaneously attracting the attention of new fans. And they do it every year.

There’s a lot for marketers to learn. Here are three takeaways:

Lesson #1: Let them play.

Bracketology, the term that was invented by Joe Lunardi in 2002, is the process of predicting the college basketball participants in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. It’s a great example of gamification, which is the application of elements of game playing to other activities that typically involve engagement with a product or service.

With an estimated 50 million Americans filling out brackets, it’s a marketer’s dream. In fact, more people filled out a bracket this year than voted for either Obama or Romney in the 2012 election.

According to M2 Research, the gamification industry will grow to over $2 billion by year-end and over 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application. Why? People love to play games. Games offer people the opportunity to have a shared sense of purpose, challenge and reward. Marketers have learned how to apply these mechanics in imaginative ways, which results in enhanced customer loyalty, incentives to buy, and compelling reasons to stay with a company as a customer or employee.

Lesson #2: Limit your offer.

The NCAA is a savvy marketer. It created an annual event with a limited time offer. Their brainchild, March Madness, the epic college basketball tourney, is the largest national, single-elimination competition in the world. After every game, all 65 of them, the losing team is sent home.

There are no three game series or double elimination playoffs. Like any promotional event with an expiration date, miss one game and you miss a lot.

Lesson #3: Make it accessible.

The NCAA did a remarkable job of enabling their customers to easily watch the games. Didn’t feel like watching last night’s final match between Duke and Wisconsin on TV, no problem. You had many viewing options that were easy and free. Sure, CBS broadcast the big game on TV but if that wasn’t convenient, you could have live streamed it through a subscription service called CBS All Access. Though it usually costs $5.99 a month, you could have taken advantage of their “one week for free” offer.

Rather tap into your cable provider?  Many offered customers the option of streaming live TV online as part of a subscription. Not into TV?  Westwood One Sports and Sirius XM aired the games on the radio.

But wait, there’s more! The NCAA went above and beyond this year. How? The NCAA offered “Team Stream”, meaning if you’re a Duke fan and you wanted Duke commentary during the game, all you had to do was flip the channel. The Team Stream broadcasts aired on TNT and TruTV.

Learn from the NCAA. Make it fun, create some urgency and make it easy.