Introduction
World Baseball Classic is one of those events that makes the scale of international baseball genuinely visible
Twenty teams, four host cities - Tokyo, San Juan, Houston, Miami - 47 games across 14 days, with the Final on March 17th.
The Challenge
Engaging global fans, in multiple languages
For a tournament with fans spread across Asia, Europe the US and Latin America all following closely, a single-language, single-market experience was never going to cut it. So we built the Bracket Challenge to run in three languages - English, Spanish and Japanese - integrated with the relevant tournament account infrastructure for each market.
The Experience itself is a bracket. Fans pick which two teams advance from each of the four pools, build their knockout bracket from there, choose a champion, and watch how it plays out. Their bracket updates automatically as real results come in - the live stats integration handles that, so a fan doesn't need to keep refreshing scores to know whether they called the Tokyo pool right.
Solution
A popular format that drives participation, with social sharing to increase reach
We utilise the bracket format for tournaments specifically because it distributes investment across the whole competition. A fan who's predicted their bracket has a reason to care about every pool result, not just the matches involving their team. That matters across 14 days. The casual viewer becomes someone with skin in the game from day one.
The other thing worth mentioning: fans can share their full bracket on social, which tends to do a lot of the distribution work organically. Add in email opt-in for World Baseball Classic communications, and the experience becomes a genuinely useful data touchpoint, not just a fan-facing feature.
