How Snapchat is engaging ‘the next generation of fans’ during March Madness

No sports fan’s gameday experience is complete without scrolling social, and March Madness is no exception.

For Snapchat, the tournament is part of a broader push into sports that’s a decade in the making. It started with typical coverage—highlights from big events like rivalry games—which remains vital to the average sports fan. But with the majority of Snapchat’s audience under the age of 25 at the time of the initial push, the platform wasn’t looking to only engage the typical fan.

“Our angle became, ‘How do we capture casual fans?’” Anmol Malhotra, Snap’s head of sports partnerships, told Marketing Brew. “How do we capture the next generation of fans? The person today who doesn’t know that March Madness started…but can relate to a bracket pool with their colleagues?…So we started covering everything else—the pregame, the postgame, the fans, the locker room, and really providing a 360, immersive experience of what a major sporting event is.”

Fast-forward 10 years, and Snapchat has partnerships with major leagues like the NFL, NBA, and WNBA, as well as rights holders like NBCU. During the first round of March Madness, Marketing Brew pulled Malhotra away from the games to talk through Snapchat’s current approach to covering the tournament, brand activations around basketball content, and trends in the broader sports media landscape.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How are some of the schools and the brands involved in March Madness using Snapchat to engage fans?

A lot of the schools have what we call Snap Star accounts, our version of a verified account, and can post throughout the tournament, and obviously they post throughout the season. So you’ll see a lot of that across the platform. And then we’re doing a lot with brands across the platform. We have a lot of really cool things happening with Taco Bell…They have a really cool Snapchat campaign across the month of March, including a number of our products—First Lens, First Story. We also have other big brand partners like Uber, Powerade, and Buffalo Wild Wings that are running snaps throughout the tournament. Beyond that are our broader content relationships. A lot of partners can cover March Madness in different ways. We have a big relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery…Turner, etc. That’s where we’re getting our coverage, but I think a lot of the coverage we’re going to get is also from the teams, the players themselves, and the people creating content for the platform.

How do you tap into those players and storylines as the tournament progresses?

There are a ton of players who will become household names in the next three weeks that no one knew who they were for the past three or four years. That’s what’s great about our platform, is that we can see that and then react to it… We lean in further and say, “Hey, we have a little bit of time to see, if we already have a relationship with some of those teams, or some of those players, how can we double-tap on some of those areas?” But we’re always really surprised in a really great way. This is the beauty of March Madness. The best analysts and bracket-pickers can have every single thing figured out, and their brackets are busted after two days because of all the craziness that happens.

Tell me a little bit more about what you mean when you say you’ll double-tap on them.

If we already have a relationship with the team or the conference, we can then say, hey, this team’s going further. We can pretty much guarantee they’re probably our Snapchat users, given their age and given our core demographic. Is there a way we can highlight them more? If the team’s already on the platform, how do we help facilitate cool content happening during the week?

What tends to happen is that these teams come out of nowhere. Through our content partners that are covering March Madness, generally speaking, we can double-tap on them and say, “Hey, let’s lean in further with some of these areas. How can we shed more light on some of these stories?” We can use some AR tools and creation tools to help amplify those as well. After the Villanova/UNC 2016 game [that ended on a] buzzer-beater from Villanova, we made a Snapchat happy celebration lens and put it over the campus of Villanova. We made a sad, crying lens filter, and we put it over the campus of UNC. Very simple. You can imagine the unbelievable content we got.

What have you seen in terms of growth of the women’s game on Snapchat in the past few years?

We definitely saw the Caitlin Clark effect on Snap, both in March Madness and the WNBA. I would argue, the women’s game has grown so much, and because of the way the men’s game has evolved, and because of those players being able to go to the NBA so quickly, I think sometimes they’ve lost that name recognition, whereas Caitlin played at Iowa the whole time. You have JuJu [Watkins] at USC this year, you have Notre Dame’s women’s team, which is incredible, you have Paige [Bueckers] at UConn, you have people that have been around, so now as a fan, you get to see people come back. I think sometimes with the changes on the men’s side, you can lose that, because you get someone who’s amazing only for one year, and then they go to the NBA. From a household-name standpoint, from a Snapchat standpoint, I would argue that there are probably more people that know more big-time players in the women’s game than the men’s game, which is amazing. Because of that, they’ve now created followings that are really sticky, because you’re following these people throughout their journey, which is really fun.

Second screens are such a big part of sports viewership now. Do you think leagues are keeping up and meeting fans where they are on their phones?

I would say for a lot of folks, it’s their primary screen…Leagues were very hesitant eight, nine, 10 years ago, of allowing their players to be super vocal on social media and on digital platforms…Now they realize all these players are a conduit to the league. If they have more of a following, the league will have more of a following, and if they do a better job, the league will do a better job, and people will tune into games even more. I think they’ve embraced that and are embracing platforms like ours, where we can provide that young, highly engaged, new fan that, candidly, they’re not reaching on the traditional properties.

Correction 04/01/2025: A previous version of this article incorrectly named Taco Bell as an NCAA sponsor; it is not.