What Happened
The annual NCAA college basketball tournament is currently underway, and like other major sports events, brands such as Allstate, Coca-Cola, and Kia are getting onboard with the March Madness via ad buys and sponsorships. Allstate, for example, is running ads in Snapchat’s March Madness Live Story and on Twitter. The real-time Twitter campaign features former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and longtime sportscaster Dick Vitale, who share their reactions to games in real time with sponsored tweets and live-streams on Periscope. Moreover, the teams are testing real-time social products as well, as 18 of the 68 teams competing in this year’s tournament tried out Facebook’s Live Video this week to rally their fans.
What Brands Need To Do
A big draw of sports events lies in an immediacy that requires the audience to watch live, which has made sports programming particularly resistant to the ongoing erosion of live ratings. Therefore, Allstate is smart to use live tweeting and Snapchat’s 24-hour-only content channel to lend a sense of that immediacy to its sponsored content and ads. With more and more media platforms exploring live video features, brands should have plenty of opportunities to try their hand at real-time marketing.
Source: AdWeek
