Train Like Your Team (Fitness × March Madness)

Often I hear how brutal the competition is in health & fitness apps. That the leaders own the category. But then, March Madness 2026 happened.

757M combined viewers across 67 games. Championship Sunday peaked at 19.7M, up 29% year over year. Opening week averaged 10.7M, up 9%. $3.4B moved through legal betting. Broadcast rights crossed $1B for the first time in tournament history. Opening day of the bracket now outdraws the NBA Finals average.

So I pulled the top 500 creatives in the US health and fitness category by impressions for the last 30 days and went looking for the basketball hook. I found exactly one. And it was not even from an app. It was a static from @Chelsea Piers, a gym in New York, running their kids basketball classes. Not even tied to March Madness. Just an evergreen classes ad that happened to have a basketball in the frame.

One creative out of 500. Not an app. Not tied to the tournament. Three weeks of prime-time attention watched by 757M people, and the whole category slept through it.

This is exactly the moment where smaller apps can grab a piece of the cake, because the reason the leaders missed it is structural. A big fitness app runs a full creative organization. Head of Creative, creative leads, producers, designers, brand, UA, CMO. Smart people, serious craft, strong process. And that same process takes time. Briefings, reviews, revisions, alignment across layers before anything ships. A three-week window is often over before the next batch clears production. It is not a flaw of the teams, it is the reality of scale.

A small team can shoot a Final Four meal breakdown or a locker-room workout in a day and ride it into 757M viewers of attention someone else already paid for.

Competition in this category is not brutal because there are too many apps. It is brutal because the leaders write the same script every quarter and everyone below them copies it. The moment to break in is the moment they ignore.

Curious what you think. Did I miss any strong basketball creatives from a health or fitness app during the NCAA? Would be amazing to see some good ads if I missed something.

P.S. Here is that ad. The only basketball hook I found in the whole top 500.