For year two of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) and Google Cloud partnership, we wanted to demonstrate the cloud’s ability to deliver insights from data in real-time and do it in a way that showed business leaders how the tools were easy-to-use.

Brief: Demonstrate the accessibility and data-crunching power of Google Cloud.

Objectives

1) Demonstrate the ease-of-use and accessibility of Google Cloud.

2) Increase consideration and preference of Google Cloud among C-level and IT decisions makers.

3) Enhance the everyday basketball fan experience through contextually relevant insights.

4) Get developers curious enough to start using Google Cloud to make their own insights.

To show businesses how easy-to-use Google Cloud is, we enlisted 32 college students to help make real-time insights and predictions throughout the 2019 March Madness tournament.

Never had a real-time product demo relied so heavily on individuals with such little experience with the product. (And on such a big stage, too.) But that was the point–demonstrate how accessible and easy to use Google Cloud technology can be.

The students worked with data to help power a real-time hub with insights fans couldn’t get anywhere else. This second-screen experience predicted key boxscore stats and showed their progress in real-time, as the games unfolded.

The students also helped create a series of metrics that were featured in the live broadcast of the games, providing unique, real-time perspectives to fans.

Their efforts culminated with three (3) live, nationally-televised commercials that featured predictions about the teams playing during the Final Four and Championship games.

The goal was to demonstrate the power and simplicity of Google Cloud, and how it can easily and quickly turn data into insights. As the “Official Cloud of the NCAA,” we used the most watched and celebrated event in college sports–March Madness–to showcase the cloud’s accessibility and power.

Using 80+ years of historical NCAA data—and real-time, play-by-play data—our student developers built models that provided fresh insights and never-before-seen perspectives into the game. This included everything from a set of new metrics, like Clutchness, Explosiveness, Discipline, Defensive Stoppage Power, and Point Production at the Rim. And a series of predictive models that forecasted key boxscore stats, like the number of rebounds, possessions, 2-point attempts, 3-point attempts, and assists.

In all, the student’s work helped power three (3) real-time commercials that aired during the Final Four and Championship games, several new metrics, more than 20 in-broadcast stats, and dozens of predictions—giving college basketball fans insights they couldn’t get anywhere else.

It all started at an MIT hackathon, where our student developers familiarized themselves with Google Cloud, and working alongside Google mentors, began thinking of new ways to measure college basketball. They used their hackathon learnings to build models around a new set of metrics, like Clutchness, Explosiveness, and Point Production at the Rim. They also helped make a series of predictive models that forecasted key boxscore stats, like the number of rebounds, possessions, 2-point attempts, 3-point attempts, and assists.

This data powered content featured on various channels—from broadcast to digital to social. This includes three (3) live commercials that aired on national television (CBS) during the Final Four and Championship games, in-broadcast stats used by announcers, a real-time insight hub, predictive Tweets, and the NCAA BracketIQ app. The content was made and published throughout the March Madness Tournament, March 19–April 8, 2019.

We delivered dozens of data-driven insights to basketball fans throughout the tournament, giving them contextually-relevant content across a variety of media, all powered by Google Cloud technology. Additionally, our three (3) live ads generated three (3) accurate predictions to a nationally-televised audience.

Reach

Over 24,000,000 viewers saw the live ads. Source: Google Internal Analytics

100 million impressions on Bracket IQ. Source: Google Internal Analytics

Engagement

+8% new users on the Google Cloud website

385,000 sessions on the hub

Impact

In just over three weeks, the campaign drove a 5% lift in Google Cloud search volume and a 6% increase in unaided brand awareness. Source: Google Analytics, 4/12/19, Google Internal Metrics, 4/18/2018