March Madness is the most sports-fanatical month of the year. Our challenge was to turn this tournament into a time to raise awareness for Coaches vs Cancer. We did this by turning cancer survivors into basketball heroes and turning an age-old NCAA tournament downer—the busted bracket—into an uplifting rallying cry, #UNBUSTABLE. 

We recruited basketball-playing cancer survivors—dubbed the “Hardwood Heroes”—and paired them with a legendary NCAA coach, unleashing their unbreakable fighting spirit on TV and Facebook videos that showed their inspirational stories.

We created posts encouraging real-time entries and donations and urging fans to enter Infiniti’s Round-by-Round Bracket...the only March Madness brackets that never bust. Where every round is a fresh star and every correct pick nets a donation from INFINITI to Coaches vs. Cancer®.

Our 2017 Heroes even played a live exhibition game at the Final Four against the 2016 Hardwood Heroes team that was broadcast by Facebook Live and CBS Sports. In the end, we raised over one million dollars. Had 9.4 million Hardwood Heroes video views, 11 million Round-By-Round picks and 283 million Tournament digital impressions. Best of all we and made people care about fighting cancer as much as they cared about watching basketball.