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March Madness coming to a digital billboard near you

Lamar Advertising Co. displaying real-time scores and live tweets on digital signage in the home markets of surviving teams and venue location markets for this year's NCAA Men's Basketball Championship tournament.

March 25, 2015 by Christopher Hall — w, t

If you live in a town with a team still playing in this year's NCAA Men's Basketball Championship tourney, live scores and tweets from the games will be coming soon to a digital billboard near you.

Lamar Advertising Co. will be featuring the scores and tweets on its digital billboards as part of its #BillboardBrackets campaign, the company has announced. Made possible by technology developed in-house, Lamar began its #BillboardBrackets campaign by displaying live scores on its network of digital signage displays. After a successful trial run during the Dayton, Ohio, first round games to finalize the brackets, the hyper-local campaign was rolled out for the remainder of the tournament.

As the teams battle, live scores are updated on Lamar's digital billboards in the teams' home markets and the market hosting the game. The opening game, between the Manhattan College Jaspers and the Hampton University Pirates, featured scores updated in real time in the host market of Dayton, as well as in New York City and Richmond, Virginia, the markets local to the two teams. As the tournament progresses, the 68 teams' local markets will be eliminated from the live score updates as their teams exit the tournament. As teams get eliminated, the billboards mimic the concept of the brackets decreasing and markets with live scores "drop off" accordingly.

"Lamar's digital billboards feature dynamic technological capabilities that allow advertisers to stay relevant to audiences based on both time and location," Lamar Director of Innovation and Digital Strategy Ian Dallimore said in an email. "The #BillboardBrackets campaign is being done on a national scale, but we're using our digital technology to amplify message relevance on a local level. We are keeping sports fans informed in real time by displaying live score updates on digital billboards in relevant 'fan markets.'

"Between games, we're keeping fans engaged by streaming user-generated content from Twitter with the hashtag #BillboardBrackets directly to our billboards. On the back end, we also use a social listening tool to measure the #BillboardBrackets hashtag usage across social media channels within a given market. Digital is a flexible messaging platform that takes out-of-home to the next level, and this campaign showcases the dynamic capabilities of our digital network."

In order to maintain the momentum of the campaign between games, the company said, it added a social media component with the dedicated hashtag #BillboardBrackets. Live tweets containing the hashtag will be streamed to the digital billboards. Webcam shots from the digital billboards will be posted in a #BillboardBrackets photo album on the Lamar Advertising Company Facebook page, so people can see their tweets running on the billboards.

"Some of the biggest moments in sports happen during the NCAA basketball tournament every year," Dallimore said in a statement. "We are excited to display live scores and tweets on our digital billboards for the #BillboardBrackets campaign. It's a great way for us to showcase the flexible technological capabilities of our digital displays on a national scale, while keeping basketball fans engaged and informed in their respective local markets."

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