Google Cloud TV Spot Shows How Student Developers Can Make Sense Of March Madness

As basketball fans tune in for some intense competition during the 2019 NCAA Tournament, Google is using the commercial breaks to show how its Google Cloud infrastructure is running data analytics applications to help developers better understand the game and even predict what might happen.

Produced by its creative agency Eleven Inc., the 30-second TV spot takes viewers on a journey through what might be one of the most relaxed-looking developer environments ever. A woman takes a break from coding by tossing a toy basketball into a net, while in the floor below, a model train brings soft drinks to other members of the team, who are flanked by a wall of very old-fashioned looking TV sets. Another team member is studying a revolving rack of NCAA jerseys for some reason. Then a chicken mascot goes for a run, and . . . well, here it is:

The team behind Google Cloud offered more details about its partnership with the NCAA in a blog post published a few days ago, explaining that a collaboration born in 2018 has been expanded:

At Google Cloud Next on April 9-11 (right after the Final Four), we’ll be hosting two bootcamps that use NCAA data to show you how to build a data science environment covering ingest, exploration, training, evaluation, deployment, and prediction,” the blog post explains. “We’re also demonstrating our platform’s accessibility and ease of use by recruiting 30 college students from all over the country to expand our all-star predictions team.”

Though it’s not called out specifically in the TV commercial, the Google Cloud blog post adds that the same technology used by the NCAA and students could be applied in myriad other business contexts. The company is also hosting what it described as a predictive modeling competition with Kaggle, an online data scientist community, that will offer $10,000 in prizes for the winners.