Your NCAA Bracket Is Wrong—and That’s Exactly What Advertisers Are Betting On

Want to sell food, alcohol, or consumers products during March Madness? Try these two words.

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Adobe Stock

Over the past month, two words have dominated marketing campaigns: bracket busted. The phrase has been invoked in promotional campaigns for snacks, consumer packaged goods, breweries, sports bars, and even professional wrestling, and it will likely be plastered everywhere this weekend as the Final Four for the women’s and men’s NCAA basketball tournaments tip off in Phoenix and Indianapolis.

Stressing—and sweating—over your picks? Pick up some Degree deodorant, courtesy of Candace Parker. Regretting the wrong Cinderella team you picked or the upset you missed? A few lucky fans got to cash in on those incorrect predictions. Reese’s ran a sweepstakes that called on sports fans to post on social media when their bracket busted, tagging the candy brand for the chance to win free tickets. 

“March Madness is the ultimate emotional rollercoaster. Fans go all in on their brackets, and somehow, chaos always wins,” Melissa Blette, a senior brand manager at Reese’s, said in a statement. “We’re embracing the madness and turning busted brackets into something worth celebrating.”

For the men’s Final Four fan experience, All Elite Wrestling will be sponsoring a bar pop-up. The name: Busted Brackets. As March Madness has ballooned into a billion-dollar enterprise for advertisers, the actual basketball itself has taken a backseat to the gamification around it. That shift should come as no surprise. The tournaments have become synonymous with office pools as sports betting—and now prediction markets—have become indistinguishable from the experience of watching the games, particularly for younger fans. 

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A third of Gen Z and a quarter of millennials reported actively participating in sports betting and prediction markets, according to Northwestern Mutual’s annual Planning & Progress Study, which was conducted earlier this year. Kalshi, one of the leading prediction markets, has attracted more than 4 million users. The platform has become so popular that its trading volumes climbed to more than $24 billion, making the company’s 29-year-old co-founder, Luana Lopes Lara, the youngest woman ever to become a self-made billionaire.With that sort of level of adoption, playing into the agony of defeat we’ve all felt gambling on our bracket picks becomes an easier way to sell pitchers of beer, baskets of wings, and bags of candy, than highlighting rebounds, steals, and three-point percentages.

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