March Madness Refresh — Dale Lavine

Legacy takes a team.

Reimagining a flagship March Madness-themed campaign to promote 529 college savings plans.

March Madness has long been one of our most anticipated marketing moments of the year — an annual 529 campaign that financial advisors actively look for, ask about, and engage with. Over time, it evolved from simple bracket flyers into a full-scale initiative, earning multiple industry awards along the way.

But familiarity had started to dull its impact. While performance remains strong, the concept itself was beginning to plateau. Leadership challenged teams of creatives to rethink the campaign — not by abandoning tradition, but by reinvigorating it with fresh perspective and deeper meaning.

The Challenge

We didn’t want to make the campaign louder. We wanted to make it more meaningful.

Each team was asked to develop and pitch a single, fully realized concept that could evolve the March Madness program while remaining grounded in real advisor and client needs. The work had to balance cultural relevance with long-term planning, emotional connection with compliance, and creativity with real-world execution.

The question at the center of the brief was simple: how do you make a familiar format feel meaningful again?

The Ideas

Early exploration tested different creative directions. One leaned into urgency, positioning tuition as a relentless opponent and advisors as coaches helping families play defense. Another took a more celebratory approach, honoring families and planning strategies as the true hall-of-famers.

Rather than choosing between them, we fused the strongest elements of both — combining urgency with optimism, emotion with clarity, and sports language that supported the message instead of overshadowing it.

The Concept

Legacy takes a team. No one wins alone.

Every March, people make brackets picks based on instinct, research, and hope. For years, the campaign used that structure to show how college costs stack up — but information alone doesn’t inspire action.

Our pitch reframed the campaign around legacy: the idea that education planning isn’t about winning a single moment, but building something over time. Tuition became the opponent that never takes timeouts. Advisors became trusted teammates. Small, early contributions became momentum — not miracles.

The real win wasn’t a bracket result. It was a future built by choice, not chance.

“What if your kid was the next Michael Jordan? Or the next Caitlin Clark?”

The Direction

Visually, the concept shifted away from bright, game-heavy graphics toward something more human and intentional. Black-and-white photography was paired with red and blue outlines and a dot matrix effect, keeping the subject in color while the background receded — reflecting how parents hold their child’s future in focus while navigating the present.

The aesthetic borrowed from vintage sports photography and print textures, but applied them in a modern way. Basketball — the campaign’s starting point — remained present, but never the point. People and potential remained the focus.

Bringing this vision to life required collaboration and iteration. To help bridge the gap between copy and imagery, I sourced reference photography and built rough visual mocks to translate an emotional narrative into something tangible.

Through multiple rounds of refinement, my design partner and I aligned on a shared vision — one that ultimately shaped the final look and feel. The process reinforced the value of clear creative direction, trust, and partnership in pushing an idea beyond its first execution.

The Outcome

While this concept wasn’t ultimately selected for launch, it reflects how I approach creative direction: honoring what works, challenging what doesn’t, and guiding ideas toward clarity, cohesion, and purpose.

Legacy campaigns don’t need reinvention for reinvention’s sake. They need perspective, and a team that’s willing to push them forward.