• The average household rating for the tournament to date is 5.3%. The number is up a tick from the 5.2% through the same time last year.
• An average of 9.6 million viewers tuned in to the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games this year – the most average viewership for those games since 2006.
• The most-watched session of the tournament so far was the second round - which featured three hotly contested games – on Sunday, March 22nd at 5pm ET. An average of 11.2 million viewers tuned in to watch Louisville-Siena, Michigan State-USC, or Marquette-Missouri during that time.
• The talk of the blogosphere among the Final Four teams is Michigan State, who has the fortune of playing for a national championship in front of a home crowd in Detroit. The Spartans captured almost 34% of discussion involving any one of the Final Four schools over the last month. UNC captured 26% of the buzz, followed by UCONN  with 22% and Villanova with 19%.

Percent of Blog Buzz for Final Four NCAA Teams, March 1st -March 31st, 2009

• Internet sports sites surged in March as a result of March Madness. The number of unique visitors to sports sites peaked the week of March 22nd – the week leading up and into the Sweet 16 – with 46.5 million people logging on.

Sports Websites – Unique Audience

• According to a Nielsen Sportsquest poll, heavy NCAA Men’s Basketball fans were 131% more likely to have participated in a tournament pool this year than the total U.S. population.
• Sportsquest also found that 7.9% of total respondents said they watched the opening round games at a location other than their home or someone else’s home, with 27% of those respondents saying that they watched the first round of NCAA March Madness games at work. About 38% of those same respondents said they watched these games at a bar or restaurant.

For more information on March Madness trends and insights, please contact Aaron Lewis.

“The one thing you think about as far as the NCAA tournament is it’s synonymous with CBS,” said Ziangas. “I think advertisers understand that. That’s why you have people like Coke and AT&T – and even GM is actually coming back to the tournament when they pulled out of the Super Bowl. Having that cache as far as that association of the tournament to the network and bringing in that great male 18+ demographic is something that very few advertisers see, and that’s why they jump on board with the NCAA tournament.”

Watch the video for more from Tom Ziangas about advertising and the NCAA Tournament.

Nielsen’s Guide To March Madness, tracks a range of consumer and media information surrounding the event including advertising trends and demographic reach of the multi-week event. Ad buys for CBS’s coverage of the NCAA Tournament have risen steadily over the last five years – from $434 million in 2004 to $580 million in 2008 – a surge of almost 34 percent.  Spending for the Final Four Championship game has grown 47 percent over the last five years.  Last year’s final game saw $97.5 million in advertising, with the cost of a 30-second commercial over $1 million.

Over the last five years, General Motors has spent the most on ads with a total of $317 million. Last year, the auto company was the top spender, with $64.7 million in spending.

The automotive category was the top-spending category for each of the last five years.  Last year, automotive was top, followed by financial – investment services, fast food restaurants, wireless phone services and beer.

Scoring With Fans?

Are these advertisers reaching their targets?  According to Scarborough Sports Marketing, a joint venture between Nielsen and Arbitron, the answer is a resounding “yes.”  Viewers and listeners of the tournament are likely to be male, educated and married.  They have higher than average annual household incomes and and a wide range of interests, hobbies and consumer preferences:

An NCAA Fan Is…

• 10 percent more likely to have visited a casino in the last year
• 17 percent more likely own three or more vehicles in their household
• An avid fast food consumer, and is 34 percent more likely than the average adult to have visited a fast food chain 10 or more times in a week
• 33 percent more likely to have consumed any beer in the last month, with Bud Lite, Budweiser and Corona the leading brands in the light domestic,  regular domestic and imported categories.

Download Nielsen’s complete Guide To March Madness

“The NCAA Tournament is very attractive to sports marketers even in tough economic times,” said Tom Ziangas, SVP for Nielsen Sports. “The games playing out over several weeks make it a sort of mini-series for viewers. There’s always some unexpected drama or Cinderalla story – like Davidson College last year – that makes March Madness a compelling reality show as well as a prime sporting event.”

In 2008, the tournament reached nearly 100 million viewers in the US, with basketball hotbed Louisville, KY, delivering the highest ratings for a local market in the last five years.

Most Avg. Viewers, NCAA Championship Game (millions)

1979 – Mich St. vs. Ind. St. – 35.1
1992 – Duke vs. Michigan – 34.3
1993 – UNC vs. Michigan – 32.9
1994 – Arkansas vs Duke – 32.7
1983 – NC St. vs. Houston – 32.1

Top Local Market Rating, NCAA Tournament 5-year Avg.

Louisville – 19.0%
Raleigh-Durham – 13.0%
Memphis – 12.9%
Cincinnati – 12.9%
Columbus – 12.7%

March Madness On The Web

ESPN and Yahoo! were the two most-visited sports sites last March with 19.8 and 19.4 million unique users, respectively. Traffic on the CBS Sports web brand shot up 59 percent in March 2008 over the previous month. Online buzz spiked dramatically in March for last year’s Cinderella team, Davidson College. This year, there’s an additional mobile phone angle as CBS March Madness On-Demand is now available via an iPhone application as well as the desktop.

Download the Nielsen’s Guide To March Madness.