In Chicago, Lewis Lazare noted Northwestern is making its first NCAA Tournament appearance today against Vanderbilt, and social media chatter has been "ratcheted up considerably" since Selection Sunday. Data from social media analytics firm Talkwalker showed that the school had "gotten 8,700 mentions as of Tuesday afternoon." Actress and Northwestern alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose son plays for Northwestern, also "has been helping focus social media attention" on the team. Data showed that North Carolina "had the most mentions" among all tourney teams with more than 26,000, followed by Kentucky (24,000), Kansas (13,800), Duke (13,600) and Villanova (13,389) (BIZJOURNALS.com, 3/15).
LOOKING AHEAD: Turner Sports and Twitter have partnered on a new live NCAA men's basketball tournament preview show that debuted this morning on the social media platform. “NCAA March Madness Now” is a social-driven tournament preview show originating from Turner Sports' studios in Atlanta. The show, hosted by Noah Coslov, will run again live on Twitter tomorrow at 11:30am ET, and again on April 1 and April 3 to preview the Final Four and national title game, respectively. Coslov will be joined by Jarvis Hayes today and tomorrow, and Caron Butler during the latter set of shows (Eric Fisher, Staff Writer).
THE TRIUMVIRATE: The WALL STREET JOURNAL's Mike Shields reported Turner, Viacom and Fox Networks Group are "joining forces to make it easier for advertisers to use data to target ads across multiple TV networks." They announced the launch of OpenAP, a web-based platform "where advertisers can mix and match data sets to create ad targeting criteria that can be used for multiple TV buys." The move comes as the TV industry is "looking to adopt some of the precision ad targeting and automation that has become standard for digital advertising" (WSJ.com, 3/15).
