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WFNI partners with Jim Beam for their UPICKEM College Basketball Contest

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BACKGROUND:
WFNI and 1070thefan.com took part in the annual national college basketball contest from Second Street. WFNI is owned by Emmis Communications. Its Digital team understands the importance of integrated campaigns, using not only online ads to promote this contest, but also on-air talent across all three of its stations in the Indianapolis area.

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CHALLENGE:
Indianapolis has several media companies that run their own version of the College Baskeball contest. WFNI needed to present an idea to their sponsors that helped them stand out from the rest.

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SOLUTION:
WFNI’s Bracket Challenge combined their listeners’ passion for the station and its personalities with the excitement of the year’s biggest college sports event to leverage a powerful interactive marketing opportunity for their sponsors. WFNI took advantage of the Second Street national prize of $1,000,000 to the player with a perfect bracket. Players also competed for round by round national & local prizes. Rather than being tied to their original picks, players picked each round progressively which kept them “in the game”, thus increasing exposure to the sponsor’s message.

The promotion for their College Basketball Contest included on-air ads, online banner ads and email reminders before each round. The presenting sponsor was Jim Beam Whiskey. The online component, beyond ROS ads, included additional online banner and radio spots promoting the contest. A larger display at the top of the contest page featured the sponsor’s logo and video commercial.

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RESULTS:
UPICKEM College Basketball Bracket Contest brought WFNI $7,000 in revenue from three sponsors and had over 1,000 player participants coming back each week for 5 weeks to play.

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Why the WFNI Auto Racing contest was successful:
Integrated station support. The Bracket Challenge was promoted heavily with all WFNI products including on-air talent mentions, on-air promos, online ads, VIP pickers from the station and an email campaign. Plus, all ads were sold for the full 5-week campaign.

We recently hosted one of our partner’s favorite webinars (okay, it’s one of our favorites, too) – 30 Contest Ideas in 30 Minutes. During this webinar, Julie Foley, our Director of Affiliate Success & Matt Coen, our President, reveals the top 30 contest categories run on UPICKEM in the past year. Each category comes complete with several examples for you to get your contest-building creative juices flowing to help build out your year-long contest calendar.

If you weren’t able to attend the live session, watch a recording in our resource center.

Be sure to check out all the contests mentioned in our webinar.

Fathead, the leading brand in sports wall graphics, announces the start of its college basketball playoff bracket, powered by UPICKEM. Read the full press release. Fathead did a great job on promoting their basketball bracket on their site – see the way the separated the up front and round by round contest.

With the approach of the March college basketball playoff brackets, we are seeing creative and original brackets pop up on our UPICKEM affiliates’ sites. For example, check out this bracket contest from St. Louis Post-Dispatch – the paper pits all things St. Louis against each other to discover its readers’ favorite places, food, things & people from the city. Life Sherpa Joe Holleman wrote a column about the contest and even revealed his picks. As a gateway city resident, I am a bit partial to this contest – I’m rooting for the Zoo! (I also love the toasted ravioli arch!)

In honor of ActionFest making an appearance in their town, WTMT-FM (Asheville, NC) hosted an action hero throwdown with UPICKEM’s bracket engine contest. 4 quadrants were created to lead to the finals in which Rambo won (I would’ve voted for Maverick!). This is a very well-executed bracket contest, and it looks fantastic too.

Bracket contests tend to bring out the creative side in contest-makers/designers, this Love to Hate contest from 102.9 The HOG.com (Milwaukee, WI) is no exception. This station asks listeners to weigh in on their various likes and dislikes (American Idol, Brangelina, Octomom, etc.) – what a fun idea!