• by Keith Richman , April 7, 2008

The Super Bowl gets the glow when talk turns to sports advertising. One out of four people in a recent comScore survey indicated that they watch the Super Bowl more for the commercials than the game. Increasingly, that ad spend is moving online in the weeks leading up to the football championship game. That same comScore study found that three out of four people would log on to the Internet on game day.

However, what has emerged as the new time to reach men 18 to 34 years old is the time frame around the NCAA Tournament--March Madness--that three-week stretch where guys are watching several games at once, checking stats online and looking at their brackets every few minutes. TNS Media Intelligence stats showed that ad sales for the three-week tournament starting March 20 are projected to hit a record $545 million this year, up 5% over $519.6 million last year. In fact, ad spending on just the Final Four games alone totaled $168.4 million in 2007, more than the World Series or the Super Bowl.

The three-week time frame, the fact that millions of Americans fill out brackets every year, and the intense emotions and allegiance that people have for certain teams makes the NCAA tournament one of the most highly engaged periods for advertising online. Advertisers get this. Those who are lucky to do so actually sponsor March Madness itself. Other advertisers, however, are shifting their ad spend to occur during the same time frame as the tournament itself--even if those dollars do not relate to the event at all. They do this because they know that men will flock online to follow the games and the stories around them.

We are certainly seeing that at Break Media. Check out the numbers we've seen so far: This year's online ad spend during the time period of the NCAA Tournament is 69% greater than the ad spend that occurred for the three weeks surrounding the Super Bowl. It is also still growing--advertisers this year have spent 85% more online at Break than they did during the same time period around March Madness last year.

As the Super Bowl became a cultural event, advertisers went to where the eyeballs were--and it's a potent combination of men and women, with women often watching just for the ads. The NCAA Tournament, however, is where guys increasingly spend March/early April--watching games on TV and following their brackets and teams online. It is a smart move for advertisers to allocate their dollars to the Internet and to this period specifically, when they can reach the millions of men--30% of the total online population--who spend nearly 24 hours a week online for three weeks.