One Shining Moment Happened During March ‘Ad’ness. Did You Catch Yours?

I am Fairleigh (Dickinson) certain that nearly everyone reading this blog didn’t have a good March Madness bracket. 68 men’s and 68 women’s basketball teams from colleges around North America competed in one of the craziest, most insane postseason tournaments basketball fans ever saw.

But if you were part of our March ‘Ad’ness bracket (and congratulations to the winners who put the rest of us in their rearview mirrors), we hope you paid attention until the very end of the game. After all, college basketball is connected to ad-tech, right?  

Hear me out. 

Since the mid-1980s, One Shining Moment has closed out every broadcast of the National Finals. The song was designed to capture the excitement, emotion, the highs and lows, the last-second shots and buzzer-beaters that grace the home pages and front pages of media outlets around the globe. Those moments are not just captured by photographers, but they are captured in our memory banks — and increasingly, on our mobile devices.

Imagine you are an advertiser whose content is connected using such metadata tags as “NCAA Basketball,” “UConn Huskies,” “San Diego Aztecs,” “March Madness,” “Fairleigh Dickinson Upset” and other “hashtaggable” terms. Not only is your content a part of the real-time moment for consumers along their customer journeys, but your moment will live on for a REALLY long time.

That was a point that Verve Group drove home as part of March ‘Ad’ness 2023. Moments.AI, Verve Group’s contextual targeting platform, is all about helping brands capture the moments that matter to consumers in real time. 

• Because a moment like a 16 seed beating a 1 seed has only happened one other time in the history of the tournament (Go FDU!).
• It may have been when you realized that your first-round games were picked wrong, and you realized you weren’t going to win the March ‘Ad’ness contest (fess up, you know what I mean).
• Because the last 27 seconds of the Virginia Cavaliers/Furman Purple Paladins game were pivotal moments in the Men’s tournament, forcing everyone to search what a Paladin was, let alone a purple one.
• It may have been the trash-talking moments between Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese throughout the Women’s Championship — or better yet, the moment when Ms. Clark showed the epitome of sportsmanship by saying that Ms. Reese earned the right to boast her wins.
• It could have been a moment like a storied television announcer turning his microphone off after calling his last NCAA Final game will make you realize a golden era of broadcasting was ending.

Whatever your moment was, whatever your moment still may be, remember that it can be captured — and that your One Shining Moment may be the same exact moment that a brand wants to capture for its consumers.