Google Cloud

March Madness Campaign 2018

While I was Director of Production at Eleven, Inc, I had the pleasure of pitching my old friends at Google Cloud. A key creative part of the pitch, Can Google Cloud turn the Final Four into a real-time tech demo of what the cloud can do? Eleven proposed making a TV commercial that accurately predicted the next play and broadcast a TV spot about it. Everyone from Google Cloud loved the idea, but was it possible? 

Luckily I had been part of the team at Cloneless for a while and we KNEW it was possible, and we had the technology to do it! 

We quickly put together a prototype, showed our clients at Google Cloud how the technology could theoretically work, won the account and got to work making it happen! We had less than 8 months from the award of the project till the NCAA Final Four where we were slated to run 6 TV spots. 

I worked closely with our partners at Google Cloud and Cloneless, to figure out how much Google Cloud’s cutting edge AI & ML technology could do. After a discovery period we were able to design a system that leveraged 60 years of NCAA box score data, real-time data from sports radar, a team of experienced AI experts from Google, and a team of college basketball broadcast experts, and our creative team at Eleven. 

After several months of development and testing the system was able to accurately predict what would happen next in the currently happening NCAA 2018 regular season games. 

We parallel pathed our development of the AI with a robust video content development schedule. We worked closely with the VFX & animation wizards at Gentleman Scholar to produce hundreds of bite sized ‘reaction’ clips and found footage ‘meme’ clips that the Cloneless platform would be able to customize on the fly so the spots ‘reacted’ to what was going to happen in our predictions. 

We were able to pull everything together in San Antonio, where the Final Four was held. Over the Final Four weekend we were able to create 2x spots per game, making predictions at the start and going into the second half of each game.