• by Amy Corr , March 2, 2003

The month long event of NCAA college basketball games, better known to fans as March Madness, is almost upon us. College students and alumni vie for team bragging rights (Maryland won last year’s tournament), and the games make for great conversation at the office. Four major websites - CBS.SportsLine.com, Yahoo!’s Sports channel, ESPN.com and SI.com (formerly CNNSI), offer free fantasy March Madness office pools for fans to participate in.

Each contest has a sponsor, but only ESPN and CBS.SportsLine.com offer prizes to the winners.

The sponsor of this year’s Yahoo! game, entitled "Yahoo! Sports Men's Tournament Pick 'Em" will be TUMS (a GlaxoSmithKline product). The deal makes TUMS presenting sponsor of all of Yahoo!’s NCAA hoops-related polls, includes ad banners on their college audio pages (with deals over 100 schools which provide streaming audio), and Tums will also be presenting sponsor of the "TUMS upset of the week” an editorial feature running more than once a week (contrary to its title).

Brian Grey, General Manager of Yahoo! Sports, says that TUMS “has been a great supporter of our NCAA Tournament content offerings in the past and we're excited to have them on board again in 2003."

With at least a million people participating in each pool, advertisers can reach the 18-49 male in a short period of time. In 2001, CBS.SportsLine.com lauded that they were the first pool to reach one million registrants. ESPN.com had 830,000 entries in 2001, and surpassed the millionth person mark in 2002. Yahoo!, does not break down their fantasy participant stats by sport, but Yahoo! Spokesman Dan Berger says that their “overall fantasy user base is a significant 7-figure number”.

Even the wireless medium is breaking into March Madness.

Mobile software provider AvantGo has created a microsite dedicated to the NCAA tournament to keep their PDA and smart phone users up to date with the latest scores and standings. Volvo sponsored the microsite last year, which drew 40,000 registrants and Infiniti’s FX45 model will be 2003’s College Hoops sponsor. Launched mid-February, the microsite, according to James Ryan, Creative Director at AvantGo, “will sugarcoat promotional campaigns with content that will be of value to our customers”. Such sponsorships can run anywhere from $50,000-150,000, depending on the promotional level taken, construction of the microsite, and licensing fees for the content provided.