In that environment, the National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s and men’s college basketball tournaments, colloquially called March Madness, kicked off on March 14 and 18, respectively, with the Final Four games happening Friday and Saturday. While attendance and ratings for the women’s tournament are down from last year, when phenoms Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese were unparalleled draws, beauty brands like Madison Reed, E.l.f. Cosmetics, Medalist, NYX Cosmetics, Estée Lauder and Bubble are still eagerly tapping into the madness of March Madness.

Jay Prasad, CEO of sports marketing analytics firm Relo Metrics, says, “[Sports] is an attempt for many brands to keep reaching younger audiences because the fan average age, and women’s sports age is young and younger than most men’s.”

Getting on the home turf of younger consumers is Bubble’s goal. For March Madness, the gen Z-driven skincare brand is involved in coffee chats in partnership with Graduate Hotels, a Hilton-owned collection of hotels in college towns, watch parties for both men’s and women’s teams, on-campus sampling and influencer programs. Students can join the watch parties by signing up from the brand’s social channels or through a college ambassador.

Bubble has over 13,000 people in its 2-year-old college campus ambassador program. In the fall last year, the brand along with Graduate Hotels toured three colleges—University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, University of Tennessee and Indiana University—to take part in tailgates and football games.

“We’re continuing to build an emotional connection. We believe in one-on-one marketing,” says Shai Eisenman, founder and CEO of Bubble Skincare. “And strong emotional connections also happen often in sports.”

Bubble sells in over 17,000 stores across the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, including Target and Walmart. Industry sources cited by the publication Women’s Wear Daily estimated its 2024 sales at $170 million. Eisenman says Bubble’s 2023 sales grew 700% year-over-year and its 2024 sales grew more than100% year-over-year.

Eisenman says it’s difficult for brands to have strict key performance indicators for marketing moments like its campus tours. The brand looks at the number of new ambassadors joining its program, the interactions its team has with people and overall awareness. Anecdotally, Eisenman says approximately 30% of people knew of Bubble prior to its ambassador program and that percentage has risen to close to 100%.

Medalist, a skincare brand directed at female athletes and launched by Ann Ragan Kearns, a former NCAA DI college swimmer, in July last year timed with the Paris Olympics, is advertising in the Final Four program for the women’s NCAA basketball tournament with an ad spotlighting Jailyn Martin, a member of the Trinity University women’s basketball team. Kai McClelland, Medalist’s creative lead and intern, shot the campaign. She’s a Trinity University senior and former track athlete at the school. Kearns declined to share how much it cost Medalist to advertise in the program.

“If you’ve been a female athlete, you know there is a kind of cult following,” says Kearns. “It’s exciting that, as a female sports fan, we don’t have to wait every four years [for the Olympics] now to see female athletes play on some of the world’s largest stages or getting the red-carpet rollout that they really deserve.”

Kearns told Beauty Independent in March last year that she invested about $100,000 of her personal savings into starting Medalist. The bootstrapped brand is sold via direct-to-consumer e-commerce and traveling grocery store Pop Up Grocer. Medalist will begin selling through Amazon in the second quarter this year.

Other brands are signing up female athletes as spokespeople and marketing around the tournament. Madison Reed has partnered with University of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers. E.l.f Cosmetics has teamed up with Fazit Beauty to launch undereye Spirit Stripes makeup patches to dress up game-day looks. On LinkedIn, Fazit co-founder Aliett Buttelman says the product “reimagined eye black and war paint for female sports fans.”

NYX secured a deal with University of Southern California guard JuJu Watkins, chosen as the No. 1 player in women’s college basketball by ESPN, for “Make Them Look,” a campaign that’s reportedly the first from a beauty brand to feature a female college athlete nationwide. In a big blow to the women’s tournament, Watkins suffered a season-ending ACL tear in her knee during USC’s second-round win over Mississippi State on March 24. This Monday, the Trojans lost to UConn in the Elite Eight.

Brands’ NCAA women’s basketball efforts come as an all-time high of 235,735 student athletes are competing in NCAA women’s sports across all NCAA divisions, according to the NCAA. The biggest growth in participation has been in track and field, volleyball, soccer and softball.

More investment has poured into women’s teams. Indiana Fever is one of several professional women’s basketball teams that have announced they’re building dedicated practice facilities. The Fever’s new $78 million facility will open for the 2027 season. Meanwhile, the Golden State Valkyries unveiled a newly renovated practice facility last month. The NCAA also approved new funding for women’s basketball in January.

On the college level, NCAA changed its policy in 2023 to allow athletes to profit off of their name, image and likeness (NIL), allowing athletes to enter into advertising contracts with brands. Male athletes are outearning their female counterparts, but Prasad has noticed brands increasingly equalizing their marketing spending between men’s and women’s sports.

However, wide discrepancies between compensation for male and female athletes persist. The Royal Bank of Canada and Wasserman The Collective, an organization advocating for equity in sports, collected 2022 data showing male athletes on average earned 21X more in playing salary than female athletes. Women athletes bagged only 10% of dollars from sponsorships.

Despite the enduring inequities, 33-year-old Kearns has seen a massive shift. Growing up as an athlete, she experienced large brands generally regarding women’s sports as charity. She says, “It’s gone from a charity check to them realizing there is a real amount of money here, and community and interest.”

Disney Advertising’s VP of revenue and yield management Jacqueline Dobie informed the media outlet Adweek that the NCAA women’s college basketball tournament’s ad sales jumped 200% from last year, the ad inventory is 95% spoken for, and ads for the championship game, which cost as much as $1 million, sold out three months in advance. Returning advertisers to the tournament bumped up ad buys 81% from last year. There are 112 total advertisers, and 45 new brands among them. In 2024, Disney-owned ESPN secured the television rights to the women’s college basketball tournament for eight years.

Prasad describes last year’s women’s March Madness tournament as a “watershed” moment for women’s sports. ESPN viewership for it clocked in at a record 18.9 million people. Additionally, the top women stars outperformed the men on social media. Television marketing firm EDO estimated that TV advertisers spent $244 million on women’s sports in 2024, a year-over-year increase of 139%, with basketball receiving the most investment of any sport. Last year, 18% of American sports fans watched a women’s sporting event, per intelligence firm S&P Global.

Prasad says, “That opens the door for more name, image and likeness deals for other women athletes, and so now the ecosystem is generating a lot of attention, other sports came into [the mix] like women’s volleyball.”