March Adsanity: how brands can leverage live events through social media

Adsanity: when March Madness meets advertising. Another year of March Madness is upon us, which meant a new chance for some of the world’s biggest brands to compete for the March Adsanity title in a battle of the brands, and their best ads.

The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, March Madness, is one of the most followed sporting events in America. This single-elimination tournament has become a huge national brand opportunity in sports, pulling in a whopping $1.32 billion dollars in national ad spend last year. As a digital and social advertising agency, BOLD Worldwide utilized Pulsar CORE to see if the social event sponsors would take advantage of this massive branding opportunity on social media.

And so March Adsanity was born.

BOLD took a look at the 18 official sponsors of March Madness and narrowed them down to 16 brands with the highest social following across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. BOLD then seeded the remaining 16 brands based on total followers and organized them into a Sweet 16 bracket. Each brand battled it out on game day, competing for the highest social media engagement.

BOLD’s investment in data science and collaboration with analytics platform Pulsar CORE allowed them to accurately track and record social engagement for each brand. The team with the highest number of engagements in each matchup won and advanced to the next round until a winner was crowned as the Adsanity and social media champion.

The Adsanity brand bracket is based on the structure of the official NCAA March Madness bracket from the Sweet 16 to the Championship matchup. Sponsors were ranked from 1-16 and ‘matches’ were played as the brands met in their brackets. 

Download the case study to find out who the winner was and some key takeaways on how to optimize advertising around March Madness…