(No. 14 Mercer celebrates their 78-71 win over No. 3 Duke)
Enough ranting about how permanently in shock, slightly angered I am at this year's NCAA Tournament, I must take a second to compliment the true marketing strategy of Quicken Loans and all other companies who help feed our love of bracketed competition. Quicken Loans has been trending for weeks as the Billion Dollar Bracket Buzz only grew leading up to the official kick-off. Other companies such as Audi and Best Buy have also taken advantage of competition, by creating there own prize winning brackets. The catch? Just provide them your email so they can forever span you with notifications on their latest products. Many people look past this little check however and these companies have taken advantage of March Madness fans. I know I personally have 4 brackets in multiple groups, why? Because I love the feeling when my team is in the green and I am beating all my friends.
(George Washington's 66-71 loss to Memphis ended the last 3 perfect brackets Friday, March 21st)
Sources:
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/buffett-billion-dollar-bracket-dream-dead-loses-article-1.1730089
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/mercer-beats-duke-and-it-was-men-vs-boys/2014/03/21/9b5a9130-b139-11e3-95e8-39bef8e9a48b_story.html
This is awesome! This year was definitely a "Madness!" Hopefully, for us in this class, we'll all be rewarded since we've all lost. I've got Florida winning, too. Certainly rooting for them at this point..representing the SEC!! $100,000 is a CRAZY reward for a loss. I wouldn't lose ANY sleep over that one.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post! Although the billion dollars is out of the question, I'd like to think that Im still in the running for exempting the final but that probably wont happen either. This has in fact been a crazy year for the brackets. It was a great idea for Quicken Loans though. They knew the chances were so astronomically slim for someone to have a perfect bracket and in the process they probably got millions of email addresses that they can now spam.
ReplyDeleteThere are over 9 quintillion possible bracket combinations, and no one has ever come close to filling out a perfect one, so we should intuitively know that there's no chance we could win this. But something about that "billion" word makes you want to try anyway. That number is so big that we can't help but get involved, because why not? And that's why it's such a great tactic for Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett: They get a huge bump in exposure with virtually no chance of actually having to pay the billion dollars.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great article. My friends and I were actually having a debate if could get enough people together to fix the bracket challenge. I feel like Quicken Loans would be on to us, even though it'd probably take a couple million people to actually do it. Last year, I didn't fill out any brackets and found myself enjoying the tournament a little more compared with other years. I read that there is still a perfect bracket out there, but he does not qualify for the money because he did not enter officially. With my bracket busted, I'm just gonna sit back and cheer for the upsets.
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