March Madness is testing how fast DOOH can really move
By Margo Waldrop for The Drum
Published: March 30, 2026
March Madness is built for advertisers that like urgency. The audience is huge, the emotional swings are immediate and the action spills well beyond the TV screen into bars, transit hubs, campuses and city centers. The men’s tournament tipped off on March 15 and has now moved into the Sweet 16, right as brands try to turn live attention into something useful.
That helps explain why digital out-of-home is getting more attention this year. Live sports still gather people in real time and in public. What is changing is how precisely brands think they can respond to that behavior.
According to Luba Giglia, chief operating officer at AdOmni, that ambition only works when it is controlled. Once a campaign reacts to every moment, it starts to lose any sense of direction. "The weakest campaigns try to react to everything and end up saying nothing," she says. "When every play triggers a message, creative becomes disposable and disconnected from the broader narrative. The result is noise, not impact."
Real-time only works when you ignore most of it
The industry tends to focus on speed because it is easy to measure. The harder part is deciding what deserves a response. Giglia points to physical behavior as the most reliable guide. "The signals that matter are the ones that reflect real-world behavior; where fans are gathering, how long they're staying and how attention shifts geographically,” she says. “Game outcomes and regional momentum are far more actionable than social spikes, which are often loud but short-lived.”
That changes how campaigns are planned and adjusted during a live event. Social chatter can spike and disappear within minutes. A crowd forming in a specific location, or a surge in local attention around a team, gives brands something more durable to act on. “In moments like March Madness, physical presence is a stronger indicator of engagement than digital noise,” she says.
It also forces a more disciplined approach to regional targeting. March Madness is deeply local, with fan bases clustering around specific teams and cities. That creates an opportunity to tailor messaging, but only within reason. “Over-segmentation dilutes impact and creates operational friction,” Giglia says. The most effective campaigns focus on team-driven regions or city-level audiences where attention is concentrated and measurable.
Creative systems beat reactive overload
That same discipline carries into creative. Real-time DOOH has led many teams to prepare dozens of variations in advance, each tied to a different possible outcome. In practice, that volume rarely improves performance. “Many assume they need dozens of reactive creative versions ready to deploy,” Giglia says. “In reality, a smaller set of well-structured, adaptable assets paired with planning for key scenarios performs better.”
Creative teams are starting to design for variation instead of building one-off assets. Messaging can adjust to different outcomes, regions and emotional beats without losing coherence. “Creative is shifting toward modular systems that can flex with the moment rather than static assets locked in advance,” she says. “Teams are starting to design for variation so messaging can evolve with the tournament.”
There is also a broader media consideration behind this. DOOH does not operate in isolation during live sports. It works alongside channels that extend attention beyond the physical environment. “DOOH anchors the moment in the physical world where fans are experiencing the game, creating shared context and shared energy, while CTV and retail media build on it later in more personal, action-driven environments,” Giglia says.
That sequencing requires coordination before the tournament begins. Without it, campaigns risk becoming reactive without direction. “Avoiding over-optimizations starts with a clear narrative and defined role for each channel before the tournament begins,” she says.
For brands watching March Madness unfold, the temptation is to respond to everything as it happens. The campaigns that stand out tend to do less. They focus on where attention is building, respond when it counts and carry that energy across channels in a way that holds together.
