Hoops & Hops · Coca-Cola · NCAA March Madness 2026
Four custom-built apps for one weekend on the Las Vegas casino floor. The kind of activation where guests leave with a trading card with their face on it.
The brief sounded easy until you tried it. March Madness at The Cosmopolitan, the Las Vegas flagship of Coca-Cola's partnership with MGM Resorts. Tournament energy on the floor. Foot traffic into the booth. A souvenir guests would want to post on their own.
Two constraints made it harder. The booth had to perform fully staffed during peak hours and fully self-serve the rest of the time. Every interaction had to feel like one experience, not four gadgets bolted onto a wall.
So the strategy and the tech had to be designed at the same time, by the same hands.
We built the activation as a ladder. Each rung asked for a little more, and gave a little more back. Spectate from across the floor. Vote in seconds with your phone. Stand still for a photo and walk away with a printed card with your face on it.
A live tournament bracket on a wall-mounted LED, visible from the entire floor. The booth started selling itself before guests were close enough to read the QR code.
AwarenessScan a code, vote for your Favorite and your Underdog. No app, no install. Results stream back to the LED so the wall reacts to the room in real time.
Low-effort interactionA Coca-Cola trading card with the guest's photo, printed at the booth, sleeved in a top-loader. The hero asset. And the post that comes right after it.
Investment + souvenirOff-the-shelf kiosk software was on the table. We built four apps from scratch instead, one for each moment they served. AI-assisted development collapsed weeks of build time into days, which is the only reason the budget made sense.
A real-time NCAA® bracket rendered for a wall-mounted LED, paired with a private admin panel so on-site operators could push results the moment games ended.
Scan a code, vote for your Favorite and your Underdog. Results stream live to the LED as the room votes, turning the wall into a real-time fan poll.
Native iPad app. Captures the guest's photo, composes the Coca-Cola trading card, sends the file straight to the on-site printer. The card lands in a top-loader before the guest is done talking to staff.
Web-based version of the card builder for the hours when nobody is staffing the booth. Guests build their card on a kiosk and get it by email. No operator needed.
We build the software, set it up on the device it'll live on, and hand it over. Configured. Tested. Documented.
For Hoops & Hops the trading-card station shipped as an iPad with the native app pre-installed and the printer pairing already wired. The voting flow, the selfie kiosk, the live bracket, all of them ran from URLs. No install, nothing to set up on the client side.
That is how we like to work. Your team takes it from there. Floor build, staffing, operations. Ours stays close on standby.
Hoops & Hops is how we work on every interactive brief. Design the moment first. Build the software that serves it. Ship it ready for the room. AI-assisted development means we can prototype in days and deliver the actual thing your activation needs, not whatever the rental catalog has on the shelf this season.