Quick-serve restaurant giant KFC and Southwest Airlines are driving college basketball fans to their respective mobile sites via banner ads within Yahoo Sports? ?Tourney Pick?em? mobile portal.

As millions of college basketball fans feverishly keep an eye on the latest matchups in the NCAA basketball tournament, scores and team standings, they will be able to get live updates with the new mobile Tourney Pick?em site, available at http://m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem.

?The main sponsor of Tourney Pick ?Em is KFC?they own it both on the desktop side and they?ve extended that to the mobile side as well,? said Carl Teeple, North America product lead of mobile media products at Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. ?KFC is interesting in that it shows a lot of our advertisers are going with both desktop and mobile buys, including both desktop and mobile inventory in their ad purchases.

?Southwest also added mobile ads to their campaign,? he said. ?Southwest sponsored both the online and mobile portals of Yahoo Fantasy Football and saw good results, so they were interested in Tourney Pick?em as well.

?When consumers click on the mobile banners, landing pages open taking them to the brands? standard mobile sites?Southwest?s mobile site lets them book a flight and check flight status, while at KFC?s mobile site they can search for  restaurants by ZIP code and see the nutritional values of the menu items.?

KFC Corp., formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, is a chain of fast-food restaurants based in Louisville, KY.

Southwest Airlines Co. is an American low-cost airline headquartered on the grounds of Love Field in Dallas, TX.

This year?s NCAA basketball tournament tips off on March 16, with the Final Four on April 3 and the championship game on April 5.

Tapping mobile during the Big Dance
The core demographic for the Yahoo Tourney Pick'em mobile portal, and the target demographic for KFC and Southwest Airlines, is consumers ages 18-35, especially college students, skewing male.

Both KFC and Southwest Airlines are trying to drive trafffic to their mobile Web sites using mobile banner ads.

One KFC banner is promoting the QSR's new boneless chicken filet menu item.

One Southwest banner touts the airline's "Bag Fly Free" policy of not charging for checked baggage.

Consumers can fill out their bracket for Tourney Pick?em on their PC, then pick their teams and compete with their friends to see who has the most accurate bracket.

When consumers track their brackets on their phone, they will be able to see live scores and a quick view of their teams? standings along with how their score measures up to their friends?.

Also, with integration into the mobile College Basketball site, consumers will be able to get all the news, expert analysis, blogs and other Yahoo Sports content to keep them informed on the tournament results.

?Tourney Pick?em is one of our most popular sporting games on the PC by far, and it really lends itself naturally to a mobile use case,? Mr. Teeple said. ?Historically users have to fill out their bracket, print it out, carry it around in their pocket and mark it with a pen or pencil to keep it up-to-date.

?The natural mobile use case is having brackets that update live on your phone so you can see how you are doing and compare your bracket with other people in your league,? he said. ?The mobile site includes live updates of game scores and also the brackets, which are harder to find on mobile.?

Jumping through hoops
The site is available across 2,000-plus different mobile phones, basically any Web-enabled handset.

Hoops fans can also check out what Yahoo Sports analyst Greg Anthony has to say about using Yahoo to keep up with the NCAA Championship Tournament on your PC and mobile device at the Yahoo blog.

Yahoo is getting the word out about Tourney Pick?em with links on its desktop site redirecting consumers to http://mobile.yahoo.com/tourneypickem, which explains how to get to the mobile site at http://m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem.

Tourney Pick?em is also featured on the Yahoo Mobile front page and Yahoo is running mobile banner ads promoting it, taking advantage of house inventory across a range of its mobile properties.

?We did this last year and it was successful, and this year we?ve completely updated the way we?re doing it,? Mr. Teeple said. ?We?ve created an optimized version of the mobile portal for high-end phones that is more graphically pleasing.

?The site is optimized for the iPhone, Android phones, the Palm Pre, smartphones with those types of browsers,? he said.