March Madness Advertising: What the Big Spenders Get Wrong

March Madness advertising is one of the highest-profile media buying opportunities in the US calendar, attracting billions in ad spend across three weeks of college basketball. Brands pay a premium for the reach, the emotional intensity, and the cultural relevance. Most of them get less than they paid for.

The tournament draws genuine mass attention. But attention and effectiveness are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most March Madness budgets quietly disappear.

Why Brands Keep Showing Up

March Madness works as a media vehicle for a specific set of reasons. The tournament runs over three weeks, which means sustained exposure rather than a single Super Bowl moment. The audience skews toward adults with disposable income who are genuinely engaged with what they are watching. And the bracket format creates a level of personal investment that most sports events cannot replicate. People are not just watching. They have something at stake.

That emotional investment is the actual asset. When people are emotionally engaged, they are more receptive to brand messages. Not infinitely more receptive, but measurably so. The question is whether the brands advertising around the tournament are doing anything with that receptivity beyond buying the slot.

I spent years managing large media budgets across performance and brand channels, and one thing I noticed consistently was how often tentpole event spend got justified by reach metrics alone. The conversation would go: “We need to be in March Madness because our competitors are.” That is not a marketing strategy. That is competitive anxiety dressed up as media planning.

Brands that get genuine value from the tournament tend to have three things in place before they buy a single impression: a clear commercial objective, creative that has been built for the format, and a plan for what happens after the exposure. Most brands have the first. Very few have all three.

The Performance Trap Around Tentpole Events

Here is something I have believed for a long time, and it runs counter to how a lot of marketing teams think about major events. When you run performance campaigns around March Madness, a significant portion of the conversions you are attributing to that activity were going to happen anyway. The tournament creates cultural noise. People are online, engaged, talking. Your retargeting and paid search campaigns pick up that energy and report it as performance marketing success.

Earlier in my career I was as guilty of this as anyone. I overweighted lower-funnel performance data because it was clean and attributable. It felt like evidence. But the more I looked at what was actually driving growth, the more I came to believe that performance marketing, at its best, captures demand. It rarely creates it.

Think about it this way. If someone has already decided they want your product and they search for your brand during March Madness week, your paid search ad gets the credit. But the decision was made before they ever saw the ad. You paid for something that was going to happen regardless. The real question is what moved them to that point of intent, and whether your March Madness activity played any genuine role in that.

This is not an argument against performance marketing. It is an argument for being honest about what it measures and what it does not. If you want to understand whether your March Madness spend is working, you need to look beyond last-click attribution and ask what is happening to brand consideration, new customer acquisition, and reach into audiences that were not already in your funnel. That is a harder measurement problem, but it is the right one.

For a broader view of how this kind of thinking fits into go-to-market planning, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks that sit behind decisions like this.

What the Best March Madness Campaigns Actually Do

The campaigns that tend to work well during March Madness share a few characteristics that have nothing to do with how much was spent.

First, they have a genuine reason to be there. Brands like AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Capital One have built long-standing associations with the tournament because they invested in that association over time, not because they showed up with a big budget one year. Cultural relevance is earned incrementally. You cannot buy it in a single media plan.

Second, the creative is built for the emotional register of the event. March Madness is unpredictable, dramatic, and often absurd. Upsets happen. Brackets get destroyed. There is genuine joy and genuine heartbreak within the same session of games. The brands that connect with that energy tend to lean into the chaos rather than produce polished, generic brand spots that could run in any context.

Third, and this is the one most brands miss, the best campaigns use the tournament as a trigger for something larger. The exposure during the games is the beginning of a sequence, not the whole campaign. Someone sees your ad during a first-round game. What happens next? Is there a social layer? A retail promotion? A piece of content that continues the conversation? If the answer is nothing, you have bought reach and walked away from it.

I remember being handed a whiteboard pen early in my career during a brainstorm for a major drinks brand. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and just passed it across. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But what I learned from that session was that the most effective brand ideas were always rooted in a specific human moment, not a generic brand platform. The tournament gives you a specific human moment. What you do with it is the creative challenge.

Who Should Actually Be Spending in March Madness

Not every brand belongs in March Madness advertising, and the honest answer is that a lot of brands would get better returns from their budget elsewhere. The premium for tournament inventory is real. You are paying for reach and cultural context, and if your brand cannot capitalise on either of those things, the premium is not justified.

Brands that tend to get genuine value from the tournament share some common characteristics. They have broad consumer appeal and can benefit from mass reach. They have a product or service with a relatively short consideration cycle, so the exposure can translate into near-term commercial activity. Or they are in a category where brand salience genuinely matters, where being top of mind at the moment of purchase is worth paying for.

Brands in highly considered, long-cycle categories often struggle to demonstrate a return from March Madness spend because the purchase decision is so far downstream from the exposure. That does not mean they should never advertise in the tournament. It means they need to be clear that what they are buying is brand equity, not short-term sales, and they need to be comfortable measuring it that way.

The other category worth flagging is challenger brands. There is a version of March Madness advertising that works well for brands that are trying to reach a genuinely new audience, people who do not yet know them but who fit the customer profile. The tournament’s broad reach makes that possible. But it only works if the creative is strong enough to cut through, and if there is a clear path from awareness to consideration. Without that, you are spending challenger-brand money to achieve incumbent-brand awareness, which is a poor trade.

Understanding how market penetration strategy interacts with brand investment decisions is worth thinking through before committing to any major tentpole spend. The underlying question is always whether you are trying to grow the customer base or deepen engagement with the one you already have.

The Creative Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

March Madness advertising has a creative quality problem. Not universally, but broadly. A significant proportion of the ads running during the tournament are generic, interchangeable, and forgettable. They are professionally produced. They have the right logo placement and the right call to action. And they do almost nothing because they give the viewer no reason to pay attention.

I judged the Effie Awards, which meant spending a lot of time looking at campaigns that had been entered as evidence of marketing effectiveness. What struck me was how often the most commercially effective work was also the most creatively committed. Not the most expensive, not the most technically sophisticated, but the most willing to take a clear position and execute it without hedging.

The hedging problem is particularly acute in large organisations. A campaign goes through legal, compliance, brand, regional marketing, and three layers of senior sign-off. By the time it reaches air, every interesting edge has been smoothed away. What is left is safe, bland, and invisible to an audience that has been conditioned to ignore exactly that kind of advertising.

The tournament deserves better than that, and so does the budget. If you are going to pay a premium to put your brand in front of a highly engaged audience, the creative needs to be worthy of that moment. That means making a decision about what you want people to think, feel, or do, and then executing against that decision with enough conviction that it actually registers.

There is useful thinking in how creator-led go-to-market approaches handle the authenticity challenge that traditional broadcast advertising often struggles with. The underlying principle, that audiences respond to genuine human voices more than polished brand performance, applies as much to March Madness as it does to any other channel.

Measurement: What to Track and What to Ignore

If you are running a March Madness campaign, you need to decide in advance what success looks like. Not in general terms, but specifically. What number moves, by how much, over what time period? Without that, you will end up measuring whatever is easy to measure and calling it success.

The metrics that tend to get reported are reach, frequency, video completion rates, and any associated digital activity that can be attributed to the campaign window. These are all real numbers. They are not useless. But they are measures of exposure, not measures of commercial impact, and confusing the two is how marketing budgets get wasted at scale.

The metrics worth tracking for a brand-level March Madness investment include unaided brand awareness among the target audience, brand consideration scores, and new customer acquisition rates in the period during and after the tournament. These are harder to measure cleanly, but they are closer to the actual business question.

For campaigns with a more direct commercial objective, the question is whether the tournament period drives incremental sales or customer activity above the baseline trend. That requires having a clear baseline and being honest about what counts as incremental. If you are in a category that naturally spikes in spring, tournament spend during that period is not necessarily responsible for the uplift.

The BCG perspective on go-to-market strategy and evolving audience needs is a useful lens here. The underlying principle, that commercial strategy needs to be grounded in what the audience actually needs rather than what is convenient to measure, applies directly to how you evaluate tentpole event spend.

The Budget Allocation Question

One of the most common mistakes I see with March Madness planning is treating it as a standalone budget decision rather than a portfolio decision. The question is not “should we spend on March Madness?” in isolation. It is “given our total marketing budget and our commercial objectives, where does March Madness fit, and what does it displace?”

When I was running agencies and working on media planning across multiple clients, the brands that made the best decisions about tentpole events were the ones that had a clear view of their full-year investment and could articulate what they were trading off. Spending heavily on March Madness might mean pulling back on always-on brand activity, or reducing investment in mid-funnel content, or cutting back on a channel that was performing steadily but without the glamour of a major sports event.

Those trade-offs are real and they matter. A steady, well-optimised always-on programme often delivers more cumulative commercial impact than a single high-profile burst, even if the burst generates more internal excitement. That is not an argument against March Madness. It is an argument for making the decision with clear eyes rather than letting the cultural weight of the event do the justification work for you.

Growth strategy thinking that connects media investment decisions to broader commercial outcomes is something I cover in more depth across the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy section of this site. The frameworks there are relevant whether you are planning a tentpole event buy or a full annual media plan.

There are also useful frameworks for thinking about growth strategy in practice that can help calibrate where event-based advertising fits relative to other growth levers.

What a Strong March Madness Strategy Actually Looks Like

A strong March Madness strategy starts with a commercial objective that is specific enough to be falsifiable. Not “increase brand awareness” but “increase unaided awareness among 25-44 males in the Southeast by X points over the tournament period.” Not “drive sales” but “acquire X new customers in the promotion window at a cost per acquisition that is commercially viable.”

From that objective, you work backwards. What creative approach is most likely to achieve this outcome with this audience in this context? What media mix within the tournament window gives you the best combination of reach and relevance? What happens after the exposure, and how does the campaign connect to the broader customer experience?

The brands that do this well tend to treat March Madness as a chapter in an ongoing brand story rather than a standalone event. They have been building toward this moment and they have a plan for what comes after it. The tournament gives them a platform. They arrive with something worth saying.

The brands that do it poorly show up with a budget, buy the slots, run the ads, and then spend the post-tournament period trying to construct a narrative around the numbers that justifies the spend. That is not strategy. That is retrospective rationalisation, and most experienced marketers can spot it immediately.

Forrester’s thinking on go-to-market struggles across complex categories is a useful reminder that the fundamentals of connecting investment to commercial outcomes apply regardless of the channel or the event. The tournament is a context, not a strategy.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions