ESPN Challenges Basketball Fans to Pick Your Bracket

March is quickly approaching and that means March Madness. ESPN’s famed Tournament Challenge is back to help celebrate men’s and women’s college basketball. After a record breaking year, which saw over 9M participants and over 20M total brackets, ESPN challenges all sports fans, including the more casual fan to play the #1 bracket game.  

'Anyone Can Bracket,' a new fully integrated campaign shows how low-pressure and fun the process can be, no matter your strategy. In the lead :30 and a series of :15s spots, ESPN highlights a range of characters, from the Cat Connoisseur and Horizontal Teen to Mom Hiding in the Bathroom and Desk Tchotchke, all picking their bracket in unconventional ways.

Created in partnership with long time creative partner Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners (BSSP), 'Anyone Can Bracket,' embraces the unpredictability of the tournament. Through the campaign’s cast of characters, fans can see how there is no one way, or one type of person, who can fill out a bracket. Anyone - or anything - can fill one out and have a pretty good shot at success.

The new work will run across broadcast, digital, social, OOH, radio, live reads and email, even extending to familiar ESPN personalities filling out brackets to follow. 

This is the 10th campaign from BSSP and ESPN’s partnership, which includes award-winning work like the ‘One App, One Tap’ series and Fantasy Football executions. Last year, Tournament Challenge had its biggest year yet. The Men’s Tournament Challenge collected more than 20 million completed brackets before the start of the tournament, the most ever for the #1 bracket game. At the peak period of entries shortly before the start of the first game, fans registered more than 26,000 brackets per minute. For the Women’s Tournament Challenge there was a 41% increase in total entries in 2023 with an overall year-over-year increase in players up 23%. Marking the first time in history ESPN has achieved over 1M+ users and 2M+ brackets. These results are a reflection of ESPN’s equitable approach across the men’s and women’s games. ESPN is proud to play a role in the significant upward trend in popularity of women’s sports and women’s basketball in particular.

“Whether you're new to college hoops or a lifelong fan, anyone can play ESPN Tournament Challenge. Even your cat obsessed friend who only picks teams with cat mascots can win it,” said Seth Ader, vice president, brand marketing at ESPN. “Our #1 bracket game continues to grow, and this year it's being taken to new heights with a refreshed experience and new features, making the game easier than ever for fans to experience the madness. ESPN is the home of the NCAA Women's Tournament and we’re excited to pair our live coverage with our bracket game to create the best fan experience.”

Robyn Tenenbaum, creative director at BSSP said, "This goes down as one of my favourite campaigns we’ve created with our friends at ESPN. It’s got this hard-to-achieve subtle humour, it’s highly crafted, and most of all it really drives the message home: filling out an ESPN Tournament Challenge bracket is so fun and easy, anyone can do it– even if you have zero sports knowledge or an actual human brain. It was really fun to extend this campaign beyond just film too. It’s socially and digitally led so people can actually follow each character’s brackets throughout the tournament, IRL."