Media Impact Predicts NCAA Basketball Winners

For many, March is the best time of the year. Warmer temperatures, more hours of sunlight per day, and of course March Madness. NCAA Basketball conference championships come to an end and teams anxiously wait to hear their name called on selection Sunday.

Universal Information Services is no stranger to March Madness. We have a yearly pool in the office, we write about it every year and some of us are even college basketball fanatics – especially me (twitter). However, this year Universal has attempted to predict winners of the tournament based on media impact, not just share of voice. As media measurement geeks, we thought we would try something a little different this year and share our evolving methods with you.

Predicting the Path of the #1 Seeds

Kentucky, Villanova, Wisconsin and Duke all were selected as “one seeds” for the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament – with University of Kentucky being the overwhelming favorite for the overall #1 seed. If you’ve been paying attention to the college basketball season, you already know that Kentucky has had one of the most dominating seasons in the history of college basketball. The Kentucky team seems to be unbeatable – and our data says so as well, more on that later.

Seeing as the #1 seeds in this year’s tournament are a little bit stronger than in year’s past, meaning that the committee got the seeding right this year, we have decided to focus on predicting which #1 seeds have the best chance of actually winning the tournament based on their media impact. How can we do this? First, we take a random sample of 100 media stories across the web for each team. We then carefully analyze each story for the following measures: Click here to read our entire analysis.