BACK TO ALL BLOGS

One Shining Moment for Brands

We’ve reached the end of the road. 1-seed Virginia were crowned NCAA Champions with their overtime win against 3-seed Texas Tech. Hive wrapped up the tournament with analysis on the Final Four and NCAA Championship game. Here’s how March Madness played out for brands this year.

Hive
LinkedIn icon
LinkedIn icon
At a Glance:
  • Hive analyzed the NCAA Championship game to assess logo distribution by Brand Prominence*, earned media exposure, and viewership trends across games.
  • AT&T’s sponsored logos on digital overlays and during the halftime shows won the most screen time across all of March Madness.
  • Apparel sponsors placed their own March Madness bets by choosing which of the teams to sponsor as gear providers. Of the 64 teams, Nike backed 59% of them, followed by Under Armour with 25%, and Adidas with 16%. Under Armour’s sponsorship bets paid off by the championship as Texas Tech went head to head with Nike-backed Virginia.
  • The NCAA Championship game viewership fell slightly from last year but still reached nearly twice as many households as the Duke vs. Virginia Tech game (the highest viewed non-finals game in the tournament).

Another March Madness, another CBS ‘One Shining Moment’ montage. Texas Tech and Virginia beat out Michigan State and Auburn in the Final Four to face each other in the championship game. Both schools had never made it this far before in NCAA history and their game was the first time two first-time participants went head to head in 40 years. Hive used its best-in-class computer vision models in conjunction with viewership data (powered by 605, an independent TV data and analytics company) from more than 10M households to analyze brand logo distribution and viewership levels.

Brands

Figure 1. Results from the Hive Logo Model
Figure 1. Results from the Hive Logo Model

Hive recapped all the rounds and mapped out logo placements and earned media for all sponsors. AT&T remained consistent throughout the entire course of the tournament and scored 50% more airtime than Nike, who had the second highest amount of screen time.

Figure 2. Results from the Hive Logo Model
Figure 2. Results from the Hive Logo Model

One brand’s March Madness bets paid off big time this year. The tournament started with Nike sponsoring 40 teams followed by Under Armour with 17 and Adidas with 11. Adidas got the boot in the earlier rounds but Under Armour edged its way into the NCAA Championship game backing the Texas Tech Raiders as they went head to head with the Nike-backed Virginia Cavaliers. Under Armour went from sponsoring 25% of teams in the First Four to nearly 50% by the finals, earning them the same amount of screen time as competitor Nike. Figure 2 shows their fight from the beginning of the tournament to the very last game. These sponsors gave brackets a whole new meaning.

Games

Two defensive-minded teams faced each other in the championship this year. Texas Tech was unranked when their season started and soon found themselves in their first ever National Championship game. After being the first 1-seed to lose to a 16-seed in NCAA history last year, Virginia proved everyone wrong this year and also made their National Championship debut. The game itself got off to a slow start before we saw Virginia take a 10-point lead, fall to a 3-point deficit, then tie the game 68-68 to force overtime. Texas Tech fought hard, but at the end of the day, Virginia had the last say.

Figure 3. Viewership data powered by 605
Figure 3. Viewership data powered by 605

As the biggest night of the year for college basketball, the NCAA Championship game reached 12% of American households with a peak of 15% – almost double the amount of viewers than the Duke vs. Virginia Tech game, the highest performing non-finals game of the tournament.

Conclusion

March Madness is a huge opportunity for brands. We’ve learned which brands performed the best, what elements drove viewership, what aspects retained viewership. We also learned that you don’t need a Zion to go to the Final Four but it helps to have a star player to hike up viewership levels. Hive is the premier solution for brands looking to improve their real-time reach and ROI measurement for commercials, earned media, and sponsorships during events like March Madness.

Kevin Guo is Co-founder and CEO of Hive, a full-stack deep learning company based in San Francisco building an AI-powered dashboard for media analytics. For inquiries, please contact him at kevin.guo@thehive.ai.

Viewership data was powered by 605, an independent TV data and analytics company.

*A Brand Prominence Score is defined as the combination of a logo’s clarity, size, and location on-screen, in addition to the presence of other brands or objects on screen.