Falconnotes Internal Team Weekly Note 3/15/22
Last year the NCAA generated $1.16B in revenue from ads during March Madness. Let's leave aside the student athlete pay discussion for a second and just focus on the revenue generating machine they've built.
What the NCAA has effectively done is leverage game mechanics to create a system that gives anyone and everyone the ability to build social currency.
The Game Mechanics of the Tournament
Sports naturally have game mechanics at play - and the winners are awarded social currency in the form of bragging rights. Each year 68 teams play in this single-elimination, anything could happen tournament. The actual reward of winning the tournament goes to your conference and not so much to the individual team. The conference is then encouraged to distribute the funds equally to the schools in the conference. As the team you're really only playing for the social currency of having won march madness.
The Game Mechanics of Creating a Bracket
Based on some quick google searches I found that about 70 million brackets are created each year. The odds of getting a perfect bracket:Ā 1 in 9.2 quintillionĀ if you decide each game on a coin flip, and if you know a little bit about basketball the odds increase toĀ 1 in 120.2 billion.
These brackets are made online on the ncaa website where they have global leaderboardsĀ along with leaderboards for each pool you're in. Oftentimes these pools are pay to play and offer some cash prize to the winner, but that pales in comparison to the social currency you would earn by actually having a perfect bracket.
Warren Buffet famously put a $1 billion prize out for a perfect bracket yearsĀ ago. He hasn't had to pay out yet...
Why are we Talking about Basketball?
I say all this to challenge you all and myself to really think through how we can leverage game mechanics to create a system where our target audience can use a product or service to build their own social currency? Can we create a product or service that is exclusive? Can we create some kind of gamification and points system for people that are using our products?
March Madness is one example, these examples are all around us. It was matching week this week. Think about how much free publicity NRMP got because they found a way to make people want to show off their email.
How can we create a product or service that people want to share?
When coming up with ideas, make sure to ask yourselves these two questions:
1. Is this a metric that our users care about?
2. Does sharing make people look good?
If the answer is yes to both - let's get to work on building.