Quicken Loans may not have won the $1 billion perfect NCAA bracket pool, but the promotional effort might take the prize as the best of 2014.
Quicken estimated that it has grabbed 1 billion public impressions due to the Quicken Loans' Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge that it announced in conjunction with billionaire Warren Buffet. The deal had anyone entering the pool and running the table with a perfect bracket winning $1 billion. Nobody won the pool and with the odds at 9.2 quintillion, yes quintillion, to one that is no major surprise.
While the general public may not have known the contest was created by Quicken and Buffet garnered most of the accolades for guaranteeing the prize money, it's estimated that Quicken's brand awareness rose 300 percent during the contests run. This, in turn, generated millions of new customer leads for the country's second largest loan company, Quicken said.
The promotion was so successful that Buffet and Quicken are already talking about doing it again next year, but with one nice catch. The billionaire wants to make it easier so more tension could be built. As it was the chance at a perfect bracket was shot after the first round this year.
"I would have preferred to see it go quite a bit longer," Buffett said. "Not all the way, but quite a bit longer."
Buffet said that he has no qualms about possibly giving away the big bucks, it's not like it would have put him into the poorhouse. Buffet did not have any ideas on how to make it a bit easier nor did he say whether Quicken had yet contacted him about the 2015 NCAA tournament.
"I'd love to do it again. It's up to Quicken whether they decide to do it next year, and if they do it again, I'd like to be their insurer. I would hope we could get an arrangement that made it somewhat easier to enter and somewhat easier to win. I'd like to see it. I'd like to modify it a little bit so that people had an even better shot than they had this year," he said.
