Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 79

cost savings and eficiency. It also means a fundamental change in how
the business or agency works, how it is organized, and how power lows
throughout its structure.
There is also nothing simple about winning over individual consumers
to use the cloud for anything more than the most basic tasks like Gmail.
Why store iles, audio, and video in an unknown location when you can
leave it all on your own device or back it up to a portable external drive?
Aside from the fees charged for cloud storage, people wonder about the
wisdom of giving a company, even one with a good reputation, photo-
graphs of your family, your treasured music collection, personal email,
and sensitive iles. Companies may promise that your iles will be secure
and available the instant you want them, but just how secure are they,
how reliable is the service, how private are your communications, and
what will your cloud provider do when a government agency demands to
access your iles? What happens to your data if the cloud company you
deal with goes out of business? The decision to enter the cloud, for busi-
nesses as well as for individuals, is far from automatic and certainly not
simple, and so it has to be promoted vigorously.
Advertising the Cloud
On February 6, 2011, a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions,
including 111 million Americans watching on Fox, to that date the largest
audience in U.S. television history, settled in for the annual spectacle of the
Super Bowl. In addition to the many keen to see whether the Pittsburgh
Steelers or the Green Bay Packers would win the Lombardi Trophy that
goes to the annual winner, there were many whose primary interest was
watching and assessing the commercials. Given the size of the audience
and the intensity of the spectacle, sponsors save their best ads for the big
event. Among the recognized best that year were a Volkswagen com-
mercial featuring a young Darth Vader practicing the Force, an ad for
the Chevy Camaro about the demure but dangerous Miss Evelyn, and
a plug for Coca-Cola that brought together a desert border guard and a
dragon. Given the price of buying the attention of all those viewers, it is
not surprising that big companies dominate the ads, paying $3 million
for a spot.