With March Madness being one of the most intense periods of time, where the eyeballs of people -especially young males - are glued to the results, it is one of the more important opportunities for online marketers to get into the mix.
It doesn't matter how big or small you are, if you have products or services that draw a male audience, it would make a lot of sense for you to include some type of offering for them to partake in.
Any type of March Madness or NCAA tournament type of strategy that offers a discount, buy two get one free, etc., will draw a lot of attention from a male audience.
The variety of things a marketer could do are endless. Here's what CBS (NYSE: CBS-A) is doing to make money with their rights to the 2008 NCAA Basketball tournament:
* Selling conventional 30-second TV spots to advertisers* Logo (sponsorships) on a full package of events and merchandise
* Selling subscription packages that include all games
* Subscriptions for live web streaming video of the games
* Backend advertising by those buying rebroadcast rights to games
While it used to be enough to attain the rights to these games as a loss leader for the prestige gained for your brand, the increasing costs of securing the rights to the games make it cost prohibitive for using those rights solely for branding. That's the reason for mulitiple ways of making money.
Another example is in selling rights to the College Sports Television network. CSTV is not only buying rights to sell subscriptions for the games on the Internet, but they paid another rights fee to CBS which will allow it to sell video ad spots against the streaming video, generating another stream of income.
So CBS gets two streams of income from the deal, as well as the CSTV network. Those are the types of marketing strategies we need to think of regardless of special events or the size of our company.
The tournament gets the competitive spirit going, as well as creating a festive mood. That creates opportunities for marketers to offer up all sorts of creative campaigns and offerings to draw upon that lucrative atmosphere. With the games being played over a 20 day period, it's not too late to get things going, and tap into the potential laid out before us.
You can look at the brackets and find other information here.
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