The Bracket Evolution
Four tournaments, one expanding point of view ('23-'26)
Role: Art Director – sole creative continuity across four cycles
Challenge: Relaunch the Yahoo Sports Women's NCAA Tournament after a 10-year hiatus and maintain overall growth post-COVID declines.
Strategy: Using the multiverse fixation as a backdrop, we celebrated the limitless possibilities inherent to filling out multiple brackets on our fantasy platform.
Result: 9% increase YoY in overall brackets created and 5x the number of users registered since the women's tournament last appeared on Yahoo in 2013.
Everything is possible
Adding the Women's NCAA Championship to the Yahoo Sports platform gave audiences more reasons to get in on the madness. More brackets, underdogs, and crazy outcomes meant way more potential outcomes to win $50,000. The Bracketverse was here.
Let there be bracketballs
We conceived a universe packed with limitless possibilities, each one represented by its own bracketball. As the look got more and more epic, we fine-tuned each and every asset to maintain the sense of scale and story across all social, CRM and digital media.
Modeling & animation by Collin Breit
Fetch the popcorn,
we're getting social.
To build engagement before and during the tournament we created
bite-sized cinematic sequences based on familiar NCAA Championship
narratives. Using bracketballs as subjects, we built anticipation, teased
auto-fillers and, of course, encouraged users to fill out tons of brackets.
Even the sound design was out of this world.
Feast your eyes and have a listen below.
Animation by Chino Pisces and Collin Breit
Cross selling to the Men's NCAA
Championship audience was spot on.
The 5.5 million who watched the Iowa vs South Carolina women's semi-final (exceeding men's Final Four ratings predictions from the past ~10 years) confirmed women's sports as a huge growth opportunity for Yahoo Sports.
