March Madness Mobile Marketing 2013 – Huge Hit

The Louisville Cardinals won the NCAA National Basketball Championship on April 8th beating out the Michigan Wolverines, capping off another great tournament. However, the Cardinals were not the only winners during March Madness. Turner Broadcasting, mobile marketing, and fans also won big with the smashing success of ad-supported free streaming of all tournament games.

With over 50 million live streams run during the tournament, Turner reported a 168% increase since last year. That means 50 million people were seeing the advertisements put in place by marketers across all platforms including desktop and mobile. The primary marketers were Capital One, Buick, AT&T, and Infiniti. The impressive part about this was that all the games were broadcasted live on television, even if some games were played at the same time. Turner was able to do this by utilizing cable networks TNT, TBS, and truTV on top of the main CBS broadcast. So even despite the fact that fans could watch any of the tournament games they wanted on TV, 50 million of them still chose to view the games on their mobile or desktop devices.

Along with this, mobile device use in general is also seeing a sharp uptick in the number of people using its video streaming capabilities. A 309% increase in minutes viewed on mobile phones and a 194% increase in minutes viewed on tablets has been reported. Turner Broadcasting reported that March Madness alone had 5.8 million different users using broadband to watch live video of the games. That’s a 170% increase from last year’s tournament.

Turner mentioned that social media activity also experienced an increase in engagement from last year, with 1.4 million comments being generated by the tournament, or a 16% increase.

So what does this mean for marketers? Well, to put it bluntly, marketers need to start taking advantage of streaming video’s advertising capabilities, especially during big sporting events like March Madness or the Super Bowl. Turner Broadcasting has proven that people ARE watching streaming video, and they are watching it by the millions. Just by placing an ad within a network’s streaming video interface, you are guaranteeing yourself exposure to millions of people. Along with this, most of them are on mobile devices, so it will be easier for them to click on your ads and become engaged with your brand as opposed to seeing an ad on the street or a billboard where it would take more effort on their part to engage with you.

As a marketer, you shouldn’t even have to think twice about this. Take advantage of ad-supported free streaming today and expose yourself and your company to the millions of people who are now watching TV on their mobile devices!