Whereas Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese might have been the celebrities of March Insanity, manufacturers actually used faculty basketball’s largest platform to make a splash.
Dozens of manufacturers had an on-the-ground presence in Dallas over the weekend, the place record-breaking crowds gathered to observe the nation’s prime expertise.
Sunday’s championship alone drew practically 20,000 followers, and the ladies’s NCAA match itself pulled in 357,542—a D1 girls’s basketball championship all-time attendance file—and a possibility for manufacturers to have interaction with 1000’s of customers.
In 2022, girls’s March Insanity on ESPN had 14 sponsors and 22 advertisers. In 2023, the community elevated that to 15 sponsors and practically 100 advertisers, and for good motive.
Throughout Sunday’s ultimate between LSU and Iowa, a staggering 9.9 million viewers tuned in on ABC—a 103% year-over-year enhance, making it the most-watched girls’s faculty basketball recreation ever. That’s greater than the typical variety of viewers for Amazon’s Thursday Night time Soccer video games (9.6 million), the 2023 Daytona 500 (8.2 million) and any Stanley Cup recreation since 1973.
I used to be on the bottom in Dallas for Adweek, taking within the motion on the Remaining 4, hitting as many model activations as I might. Along with NCAA abilities challenges and a historical past of ladies’s basketball exhibit, right here’s what I noticed from manufacturers:
Buick Sees Her
Buick introduced considered one of two centralized model activations for followers, this one immediately in entrance of the American Airways Heart. Social gathering on the Plaza featured a full bus with a stage, highlighting Buick’s #SeeHerGreatness platform. All through the weekend, Buick, in partnership with media platform Togethxr (based by athletes Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Biles and Sue Hen) hosted what the model described as “mentorship huddles” with athletes and coaches together with Hen, Becky Hammon, Nneka Ogwumike and Diana Taurasi.
The complete out of doors fanfest served as a pregame occasion with meals and drinks, merchandise gross sales, music, video games, picture ops and extra. Different manufacturers, together with Coca-Cola, additionally had small tents on the plaza.
