Dupe Your Boss With Bud Light's Digital March Madness Toolkit

What's This?

Darren Collison of UCLA celebrates during a March Madness game in 2008 (while also demonstrating how you could feel after successfully duping your boss to watch games while on the clock this year).

Image: Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press

By Sam Laird2014-03-19 19:07:23 UTC

It's the sports fan's classic conundrum this time of year: March Madness is amazing, but the plethora of games all too often conflicts with your soul-crushing desk job.

The lucky few have compassionate bosses who allow liberal use of TV breaks. But what of the less fortunate among us? This year, Bud Light aims to make it easier than ever to dupe your boss and stay up on the action.

You're likely to get much more use out of this campaign, called "Mad Things Happen," than you do from the typical beer promo. Here are the highlights, which Bud Light tells us will all be available for use beginning this Thursday, when the Big Dance's round of 64 tips off.

Mad Ads: This browser extension replaces regular banner ads with score and time updates from live March Madness games. Better yet, a sidebar will replace ads there with tourney tweets. So if you're stuck doing online research into who-knows-what, Bud Light says typical banner ads will look like this:

Mad Ads Banner Ad Example

Cheat Sheet: Spreadsheets are the bane of many a desk jockey, but what if one of your oh-so-complicated-looking work tabs were actually a table containing live updates on in-progress games? Well, boom:

Cheat Sheet Screenshot

Fast Break: For use in the most dire of situations, as you probably only get one shot at this. Press a big red button and — voila! — your computer gets hit with a terrible-looking virus that obliterates your hard-drive and makes your entire machine appear inoperable. Guess your only option is to head home early, huh? We tried this one out, and don't worry — a simple tap of the Escape key brings things back to normal.

Lucas Herscovici, Anheuser-Busch's vice president of digital marketing, says "Bud Light is offering these tools to help enhance the tournament experience for fans and help them always stay connected to what matters most in March: basketball."

Not that we'd encourage you to actually slack off work in such egregious fashion, but you can check out the clever tools here.