Yahoo Launches Jaguar-Sponsored March Madness Mobile Suite
Offering includes a mobile widget to provide scores, headlines, and other sports content.
Convinced the NCAA basketball tournament and the mobile Web are meant for each other, Yahoo launched an NCAA-based mobile initiative sponsored by Jaguar North America.
Yahoo is hoping that fans that can’t get to the game, a TV, or their PC for the latest March Madness news will turn to the new Yahoo Men’s College Basketball Mobile Widget. The widget, which will provide scores, headlines, and other content from Yahoo Sports, Rivals.com and other sites, is available to users of Yahoo Go 3.0, the company’s main mobile offering.
Yahoo also launched a new college hoops WAP site and it’s tweaking the results of searches made on Yahoo oneSearch to ensure they include NCAA tournament-related results if appropriate.
Gary Roshak, Yahoo VP, mobile advertisers and publishers, said the mobile Web is a great tool for on-the-go sports fans. “Given the intense enthusiasm around [the NCAA tournament], both in general as well as online, we chose that as a key opportunity to spotlight how the mobile Web is becoming increasingly front-and-center with folks in terms of where they go to access news and information.”
Jaguar, he said, became the primary advertiser for the NCAA effort because it was happy with the results of a prior Yahoo mobile campaign.
“They came to us looking for an opportunity,” said Roshak, adding that Jaguar ran its first-ever mobile ads with Yahoo last autumn for its XF sedan. “For them, the campaign demonstrated that mobile, as a channel is valuable to theme…It has become a mass medium,” Roshak said.
The Jaguar ads associated with Yahoo’s NCAA products will include some interactivity. For example, mobile users who click on one of the car maker’s ads will be able to pull up high-resolution videos about the vehicles, said Roshak.
