Reporting from Las Vegas … Brilliant marketing move or big waste of money? That’s the debate after Google Cloud bought advertising space on the Las Vegas Sphere to send a message to attendees this week at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, taking place on the next block over.
Google Cloud tipped reporters off to the ad on Monday, with a long list of bullet points describing its prowess in generative AI infrastructure, services, and applications. I happened to be in the area when I saw the email, so I walked over and waited until it appeared. Watch the 90-second ad in the video below.
Here is how Google describes the ad: “Inspired by generative art, this ad represents how Google Cloud helps organizations manage petabytes of data. The individual particles swirl across the Sphere until they reorganize, simplify, and resolve, bringing Google Cloud’s logo into focus.”
The reactions online weren’t quite so artistic. They ranged from the critical (“Imagine if they spent that money on their product and support?”) to the much more appreciative, “This is marketing done right. Very fundamentally right.”
Others pointed out that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian was previously an exec at Oracle, which used similar tactics at AWS events in the past, albeit without the benefit of the largest spherical building in the world.
The ad includes an easter egg for developers. If they type the prompt “$gcloud unlock sphere” into the Google Cloud console shell, it will output ASCII art touting Google Cloud Next ’24 in Las Vegas, Google’s counterpoint to AWS re:Invent, and offering special developer pricing to attend.
Alas, the ad didn’t seem to get under the skin of AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, who peppered his keynote address Tuesday morning with competitive barbs directed not at Google Cloud but rather at Microsoft and OpenAI.
Update: I stand corrected, Selipsky did take a jab at Google Cloud, referencing the water leak and fire that caused an outage for the company in France in April.
“Imagine if you had a region supported by single data center,” he said. “Or if you thought your provider had multiple AZs [availablility zones] in France, for example, and you were resilient, but it turned out that they’re actually the same location, and one incident like a water leak, followed by a fire, can take down an entire region for days. mon Dieu!“
