What Marketers Can Learn From The Madness Of March Madness

If you’ve spent the last month under a rock, you’ve likely managed to miss all the fuss around March Madness, the much-beloved NCAA basketball tournament that ramps up around this time every year.

But, if you went to a college represented in the “Sweet Sixteen,” you’re watching. If you dislike a college represented in the Sweet Sixteen, you’re watching . . . with your fingers crossed. And all over the nation, offices and neighborhoods alike are starting to argue over their brackets long before the “Final Four” are close to being crowned. Even if you don’t care about basketball at all, it’s easy to get swept up in the “hoopla.”

The genius of the March Madness branding is that it capitalizes on our national obsession with sports and adds a compelling community angle that makes everyone want to get involved.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the players aren’t pro athletes being paid millions of dollars every year; college stars have careers just starting to hit the spotlight. As a result, even people who don’t usually follow sports can relate, and they end up taking part in the office pool or sitting down to watch a game.

It’s truly a perfect storm of fun, competition, “Be True to Your School” loyalties and enough emotional ups and downs to start a soap opera!

What more could a marketer want? March Madness offers huge advertising and branding opportunities, and there are plenty of best practices and lessons you can pull from all the brand madness happening off the court.

Instagram = InstaAd?

Instagram quickly became a darling of the social media world when it launched for use on the iPhone in October 2010. The concept was –and is –relatively simple:

• Users can take photos with, or upload photos to, the Instagram app (now available for Android, as well);
• These images can be tweaked with a series of “filters” that adjust the color, contrast, sharpness, etc. , and “frames” can be added; and then
• Photos can then be shared with other Instagram users, posted on social networks or sent via mobile email.

As you undoubtedly know, it didn’t take long for the platform to draw an enthused corps of active users who have now uploaded 1 billion+ photos (including a mighty 10 million images this past Thanksgiving alone and others commemorating New Year’s Eve around the world).

Sensing an empire-growing opportunity, Facebook made the move to purchase Instagram in April 2012 for the mind-bending sum of $1 billion in cash and stock.

The sale created a bit of a backlash from users who feared their favorite platform would end up a victim of Facebook’s unpopular tendency to ignore users’ privacy concerns—a tendency that, according to some industry analysts, may have soured Facebook’s much-heralded IPO last year.

Fortunately for both Instagram and Facebook, the platform appeared to survive that initial storm of user opinion.

Fast forward a few months, though, and now the picture is not as clear. Instagram’s recent terms of service (TOS) update seemed to confirm fans’ worst fears, resulting in an almost instantaneous backtrack and revision (not to mention a class action lawsuit).

What will happen to Instagram when all the (most recent) dust settles? Will users forgive and forget, or will competitors like Flickr seize the chance to eat Instagram’s lunch?

I suppose only time will tell. But even so, smart marketers can learn a few important lessons from the way Instagram bungled communication with its community. Here’s how I believe you can avoid a similarly negative fate: