Few events rival the cultural impact that an NCAA basketball tournament has – with fans everywhere cheering on their alma mater or home team as they wait to see who the college basketball national champion for men and women will be. Whether hanging out in the breakroom at the office, standing in line at the grocery store, or chatting with colleagues before a meeting, you can’t help but hear people debating who is going to win the national championship or how a certain 12 seed busted their bracket in the first round. This time of year, everyone becomes a basketball fan!
For ESPN’s programming between Selection Sunday and the start of the basketball tournament, Webex worked with ESPN to help support their Tournament Challenge Marathon programming designed to provide expert analysis and insights to fans to help them fill out their men’s and women’s brackets.
As part of the Tournament Challenge Marathon Special and Basketball Bonanza, Webex technology enables “Beyond the Bracket” analysis to bring analysts together from different locations to share their unique insights. ESPN is using a combination of Webex Meetings, Webex Desk Pro, Webex Board Pro, and our Whiteboard feature to share their analysis, show pertinent video clips, and mark up and annotate bracket recommendations. See it in action here:
We’re also partnering with Just Women’s Sports for their coverage of the Women’s Final Four. JWS will use the Webex App plus the Webex Desk Pro for interviews and Slido, our polling application, to gather predictions of viewers. And for something super unique, JWS will commission an artist to use the Webex Whiteboard app to create drawings from the show itself, a key moment from the final four games, and a key moment from the championship game. We love seeing how others use our products in new, exciting ways.
To help our Webex team fill out their own brackets, we asked Jay Bilas, ESPN college basketball analyst to share his unique insights and tips for creating a winning bracket. It was awesome seeing Jay use our own organic innovation Vidcast to record and share his thoughts with our team. While I’ve never filled out a bracket before, I hosted a ‘Bracket Selection Virtual Happy Hour’ with my team this week where we crowdsourced my selections based on Jay’s tips!
And… this week, we launched our new Hybrid Work brand campaign and landing page, showcasing how one of our customers – T-Mobile – is innovating with Hybrid Work. Hopefully you’ll catch our ad during the NCAA tournaments! Here’s a sneak preview:
Being a part of this cultural moment is exciting and I’m thrilled that ESPN and Just Women’s Sports are using our software and devices to bring ideas and insights to life! Now, I’m off to see how my bracket selections are doing in the tournament.
Be sure to look for the Webex by Cisco logo at your favorite teams’ upcoming US events.
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