It’s that time of year again: the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament is underway with its early slam dunks and buzz-beaters in the books and the 64 teams have winnowed down to eight. When the action resumes tonight (March 30), millions of users of NCAA March Madness Live mobile app will be glued to the minute-by-minute action. The one thing the app won’t do: Hitting users with a notification every single time there’s a game development. Instead, it gives users a bevy of alert options, allowing for a self-curated customer experience (CX) that every brand should strive for in the 2020s. 

Conversely in the mobile space right now, we have the intriguing case of Clubhouse, an invite-only app for live audio group discussions that has rapidly grown to more than 10 million users after only having two million as recently as January. The startup is not only buzzy for its hockey-stick growth and fascinating audio platform — which has attracted celebrities as well as everyday people — it’s also become a media topic due to over-pinging its users with notifications. 

Many Clubhouse users are clearly not enjoying the alerts, and — as a user for the last couple of months — I can attest to getting overwhelmed myself with irrelevant interruptions. I suggest that Clubhouse learn from the team managing the March Madness Live app (Turner Sports in partnership with the NCAA and CBS Sports) about how to delight users with app notifications the right way.  

The right fundamentals

Turner Sports doesn’t want to put a full-court press on basketball fans with constant -- and potentially irrelevant -- alerts. The March Madness Live preference center gives users notification options for game updates, bracket alerts specific to users’ picks, top news, and the schools involved in the tourney. The last feature is a nice showcase for relevancy and granularity: Turner Sports actually lets folks select alerts for each of the 68 teams with a single tap of the phone. What's more, the March Madness Live app utilizes an "Excitement" algorithm to determine when games are getting nail-biting close or poised for upsets, and also combines it with fans' bracket selections, to alert them thrilling final minutes of a game and which outcomes may impact their bracket ranking. (More on the Airship role in the alerts here.) That is Final Four-level engagement, right there! 

These kinds of specific choices are why in 2019—the last time the NCAA Tournament was played due to the pandemic—a single Excitement notification drove considerable minutes of mobile live stream viewing. In ‘19, across mobile and desktop, the NCAA had more than 100 million live streams, a 31% jump from the previous year. It’s no wonder major brands like AT&T 5G, Capital One, Coca-Cola, Buick and Nissan are sponsoring March Madness Live this year on the iOS and Android versions of the app.

In fact, CBS Sports and Turner Sports have notched record-breaking ad sales for this year’s March Madness. I’m sure Clubhouse, which likely wants to become a full-fledged social network, would want to sell advertising to such formidable brands. After all, the burgeoning startup hired Netflix marketer and ad industry veteran Maya Watson earlier this month as head of global marketing. 

How Clubhouse can improve its alerts game

Clubhouse’s notifications center does allow users to choose general topics for notifications like Venture Capital, U.S. Politics and Comedy. Also, users can select whether they want to get notifications on the following basis: Very Frequent, Frequent, Normal, Infrequent or Very Infrequent. However, the app does not let users know what those frequency choices mean for the number of alerts they’ll receive. 

Clubhouse marketers and developers should go a few steps further by setting up a preference center with more specific options for topics and personalities. For instance, if automotive fans only care to listen in when Tesla is the main topic, they should be able to set their preferences so they only get a notification for those sessions. And if users just want notifications when certain people such as music star Drake, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, comedian Tiffany Haddish or futurist-author Malcolm Gladwell show up to an audio event, then that’s all they should get. The Wall Street Journal already does this with email and app notifications. WSJ online viewers can sign up for alerts for not only individual scribes like sportswriter Jason Gay and articles about popular topics like wine or singular companies like Goldman Sachs, but also subjects as narrow as when it offers a new puzzle for subscribers to solve. 

Indeed, some consumers are WSJ devotees just for the puzzle alerts. Talk about a self-curated experience at a championship level!

Winning the future

The good news is, it’s still the first round for Clubhouse. It has already changed up its growth playbook after feedback, and its exclusivity and excitement may forgive some notification transgressions for now. 

However, every single message contains an embedded, two-tap process to enable quiet delivery or turn off notifications altogether — either of which would be disastrous to Clubhouse’s entire model of connecting people for live discussions. It will be particularly interesting to watch how the impressive hiring of Maya Watson impacts the app’s notifications approach because her previous employer, Netflix, is justifiably renowned for delivering personalized experiences. That’s not to say Clubhouse should copy Netflix. The white-hot startup needs to find out what options are right for its audience through experimentation and A/B and multivariate testing. 

Clubhouse should also take a page out of the Turner Sports mobile playbook when it comes to granular preference centers and data-driven innovations to better serve their audience. As UCLA coaching legend John Wooden, who won 10 championships, once said, “Always learn from others and never cease trying to be the best you can be.”

Bernardo de Albergaria is Chief Commercial Officer at Airship, a mobile-first marketing automation platform that helps brands better serve customers throughout their cross-channel journeys.  
 

NCAA March Madness Live, one of the first popular sports streaming sites, will debut a new design and features as the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament returns after being cancelled last year by the COVID-19 pandemic.

March Madness Live this year is being presented by AT&T 5G, Coca-Cola and Capital, and Turner Sports, which manages it, said the new design will emphasize live video viewing, be easier to navigate and integrate seamlessly into connected and mobile devices to enable interactive experiences.

Read Also: NCAA 'March Madness' Tournament to Take Place Without Live Audience

One new feature is The Catch up, presented by AT&T 5G, which will give fans a recap of key moments from live games.

Game Center this year will be featured on all connected devices and include Condensed Games. It will also have a new tab to access interactive items, including polls, quizzes and alerts.

Fast Break, presented by AT&T 5G and Nissan returns.

This year the Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge has been optimized to integrate with live game coverage, reminding viewers which outcomes they predicted and his they affect their standings.

Matchup Analysis will allow fans to choose from 20 stats to personalize how they pick their brackets. Bracket IQ is sponsored by Invesco QQQ.

On mobile, Coca-Cola, Capital One and Buick will sponsor the NCAA March Madness Live App for iOS; AT&T 5G, Capital One and Nissan will sponsor the Android app. On connected streaming devices: Capital One and AT&T 5G will sponsor the Roku app; AT&T 5G will serve as a sponsor for the Apple TV app; Capital One and AT&T 5G will sponsor the Amazon Fire TV app; Invesco will serve as sponsor for Google TV; and AT&T 5G, Coca-Cola and Powerade will sponsor the Xbox app.

Between them, Turner Sports and CBS Sports will provide live coverage of all 67 games during the tournament across TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV, plus NCAA March Madness Live.

The tournament tips off March 18.

Notre Dame's return to the Elite Eight for the first time since 1979, a pair of tight contests, and Kentucky's demolition of West Virginia were the tickets to the best ever Sweet 16 Thursday with the Nielsens under the current format.

CBS and TBS's March 26 coverage of the 2015 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship averaged a 9.1 overnight rating and 16 share, based on Nielsen metered market data. That was the best-ever performance for the opening night of the Sweet 16 round, since the tourney established its current TV format in 1991.  Moreover, the delivery jumped 30% from the 7.0/13 for the corresponding night during the 2014 version of March Madness.

Thursday dunked record ratings in both telecast windows.  TBS and CBS posted up a 9.3/17 overnight rating/share from 7 p.m.-10 p.m. (ET), the highest rating for the game window since 1991 and a 39% increase over last year. CBS featured Notre Dame's 81-70 win over Wichita State (pictured)  therein, while TBS presented Wisconsin rallying to beat North Carolina, 79-72.

From 9:45 p.m.-12:45 a.m., the network teammates averaged an 8.9/16, matching 1992 and 1993 as the highest rating for the game window since 1991 and up 20% versus 2014. The nightcaps showcased Kentucky's 78-39 crushing of WVU on CBS and Arizona pulling past Xavier 68-60, down the stretch, on the cable service.

To date, the tournament  across TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV has averaged a 7.0/15,  its best showing through Thursday’s regional semifinals in the current TV format, and 9% higher than in 2014.

Digitally, NCAA March Madness Live has also delivered a record-setting 59 million live video streams through Thursday, a 10% increase over last year. The platform has generated 12.5 million live hours of video consumption through the second Thursday of the tournament, an all-time best and 11% amelioration through the same period a year ago.  Thursday’s Sweet 16 coverage led to a 59% increase among live video streams and a 53% spike in live hours of video consumption over the comparable period in 2014. 

Socially, the tourney has also been a winner, grossing a record 134 million total social impressions across Facebook and Twitter through the second Thursday, That represents a 46% leap over 2014's level.

Continuing its multimedia momentum, the 2015 NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Championship set linear TV and streaming marks through the first Saturday of the tournament.

The event, airing on CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV, netted its all-time highest rating for the first Saturday since it expanded to four telecast windows across the day in 1991, boosting the tourney to a record 6.5 overnight rating/14 share average through March 21, according to Nielsen. That was 8% greater than the 6.0 average a year ago, the previous record-holder.

For its part, digital platform NCAA March Madness Live has delivered a record-setting 47 million live video streams through Saturday, up 7% from last year, according to Conviva and Adobe Analytics.

Saturday’s contests – featuring No. 1 Kentucky and the upset of the East’s top seed Villanova -- averaged a 7.4 overnight rating/17 share, up 14% compared to a 6.5/14 in 2014, according to Nielsen metered market data. That was the best first Saturday performance since the 1991 change.    

The first primetime telecast window  -- 5:15 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. (ET) -- on Saturday scored a 10.3/23 share, the highest rating for the game window since the introduction of the format. It was up 20% from an 8.6/19 last year.

The second primetime window -- from 7:45 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. averaged an 8.9/17 to tie 1993 as the highest rating for the game window of all time with the format.  That performance marked a 9% jump from the 8.2/15 in the corresponding telecast window in 2014.

Coverage of North Carolina State’s 71-68 win over Villanova (pictured) -- the biggest upset in this year's tournament to date -- bridged the primetime windows.

Showcasing Kentucky’s 64-51 triumph over Cincinnati, the second daytime telecast window from 2:45 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. averaged a 6.7/16, the best average since 2007, and 29% ahead of last year’s pace.  

Additionally, the NCAA tourney grossed a record 82 million total social impressions across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram through Saturday for a 35% increase over 2014.