Everything Wrong With AWS’ NFL Commercials
In Four Minutes Or Less
Let me start with — watching the NFL now equals knowing AWS has data. So okay, congratulations to Amazon on that. Wait, did anyone not know that before? What was the benchmark… oops I am getting ahead of myself.
Let me add that selling data services isn’t exactly easy. I get it. I’ve had my own struggles on that front. But just follow me here…
1] One of the biggest companies in the world buys time on one of the world’s top stages to promote Mental Masturbation.
Sorry meaningless radial charts, gratuitous measurements and detail, this has mental masturbation written all over it. We already knew AWS was all about data. What was the point? They had an opportunity to teach, to educate, to inform. They opted to shake a shiny object.
2] Supposed data expert opts to show us a percentage with four significant digits.
Seriously, are we supposed to believe that this exact pass was attempted more than 10,000 times? Remember — if you are showing the significant digits (which is what you should be doing in useful BI), that implies there is another not shown decimal place. But Alshon Jeffery didn’t have more than 4000 snaps at this point in his career. What’s more — he had only been targeted 814 times in his entire career. So I must assume this is some sort of Monte Carlo style simulation percentage… they believe that is accurate to .08%???
3] The supreme gods of statistics (AWS & the NFL) gave me one damn statistic to work with?
Seriously, what is anyone supposed to do with a single completion percentage? Could they have calculated the percentage for each receiver running a route on this play? For the plays that weren’t called? Hell — he isn’t even mentioned here. When they do add other metrics they are meaningless details like distance to sideline.
In fairness, the Nick Foles ad did briefly feature some other stats. I guess it didn’t do so well in focus groups? The completion percentages have only fallen both in magnitude and incidence.
4] Almost anything you can get from this commercial is summed up on one page!
That seems a lot cheaper than an AWS instance.
5] The emphasis in all these commercials seems to be on low probabilities.
So calculate the improbable and then it will happen anyway? What does this have to do with business? Oh yeah — focus groups.
6] The player cameos poke more fun at these ads than I have.
The punchline seems to be that data is silly and so are they. Am I missing something?
7] Aaron Rodgers is the only guy actually doing any math.
At least this is trying to be scientific, but they cut him off and make a joke of it. Again the opportunity here was huge. People are paying attention - but we just aren’t going to get anything remotely intelligent from these commercials. Are we?
8] This commercial actually uses technology to belittle the real decision science these quarterbacks actually perform in their head.
Look if we assumed that anything AWS offers could actually measure all this in real-time and deliver it via heads-up display to these quarterbacks… it would probably distract them just long enough to end up in concussion protocol. Worse still, given the number of permutation, combinations, and general complexity of this game — well let’s just say, the league’s worst quarterbacks have better accuracy ratings.
9] The announcers could be asking anything useful — instead he is making porterhouse and wet suit analogies.
Look, these kids are more useful than any of those announcers. “Like 9%” is way more relevant and accurate than all those decimals. And…
“How do you know catch probability?”
Where do we start? If I spin up an S3, will it make interesting analogies for me? What was the point of all this again?
Amazon had a real opportunity to leverage the NFL as a platform to tell the story of data and statistics. Instead, they opted for strange analogies, ridiculous measurements, and silly jokes. If this is about meeting the audience or catering to the demographic, who do they think they are talking to? Who do they think is making the decisions to purchase AWS platforms?
Maybe they are just trying to be cool? What a missed opportunity…
Thanks for reading.
