Google Cloud March Madness Advertising is Normalizing the Cloud

What could cloud providers and NCAA basketball possibly have in common? An affinity for March Madness. If you’ve watched any March Madness games, you’ve seen all the Google Cloud ads on the court and in between the action. What could basketball have to do with the cloud?

The Google Cloud NCAA website has silly facts about basketball. Things like, “1991 was the last Final Four upset during a full moon,” “Teams with cat mascots have caused the most upsets,” “Players wearing #1 jerseys dunk the most.” Each section has expanded information regarding the facts. They all culminate with “Want to know what your data knows?”

Knowing what your data knows is what this advertising campaign comes down to. Google Cloud is marketing to the layman to normalize cloud computing for enterprise customers. VP of marketing at Google Cloud, Alison Wagonfield, stated:

“We think it is important to demystify data analytics and machine learning. One of the best ways to demystify the complexity is to use examples that are relatable. And the NCAA has so many examples that are relatable… You can even think about it more broadly: ‘What kind of data does my company have and If I had better data, would I be able to run my company more effectively?'”

March Madness is the perfect testing ground for cloud advertising. It is so popular, even amongst people with no NCAA basketball knowledge. Personally, I’m a big NBA fan and I tend to find the NCAA hard to watch, but March Madness is exciting, and I’ve watched almost every game.

There are more advertising techniques to come as we get deeper into the tournament. Google Cloud will use AI to create 15-second ads at the start of the second half during the Final Four. These spots will use NCAA historical data to create real-time ads that attempt to answer questions relevant to the game being played. Having real-time AI created ads would certainly help me gain perspective on matchups. This alone could change how we think about advertising during live sports.

This is just the first year of Google Cloud’s partnership with the NCAA, so we will certainly see more advertising techniques moving forward. It hasn’t just been March Madness, though, I’ve seen cloud platforms advertising on unrelated YouTube videos. Normalizing the cloud is a great step to making it a staple feature in any company.