Day after World Series Ad YouTube Rocks a Robot Building Team Event

Day after World Series Ad YouTube Rocks a Robot Building Team Event

Before our Robot Building Team Event with YouTube began I had to congratulate them on the best TV ad I have seen in a decade or more. This was not the group who made the ad, however it was their “Team” so I pushed forward. Like many people Wednesday night I was reading my phone with the World Series on in the background waiting to veer my attention back to the TV when someone hits a home run – then BAM – greatest ad!

First off – the ad came right out of the live TV World Series Broadcast directly into the living room set that begins the commercial – a seamless transition from their TV to ours. The underlying beat and semi-obscure lyrics of Shimmy Shimmy Ya guides us through a long awaited solution to pulling the plug that seems to answer all our questions. My intro to this group included a kicking motion as I said “you just kicked cable off the cliff!” When polled how many people had seen the ad or watched the World Series, there was 1 including me.

True engineers from “Data” tackled the robot building team event for the 2nd day of YouTube robot competitions. This group was spearheaded by an ALL-STAR team (pictured above) that dominated every team competition. Of the 6 total competitions, the only one they didn’t finish in 1st place out of 6 teams was the Finale – which is the only “best driver” individual competition. Their build time of 26:35 puts them in the top 5 percentile of all building teams, and no team ever has had as dominating a performance against excellent competition as TEAM 8 from YouTube Data!

Team 8 narrowly won the build competition finishing just 10 seconds ahead of the next group in a thrilling conclusion. From there however most of their next 4 victories in a row were dominant and decisive. Even the dice rolling game which introduces luck and skill together, they were luckier and demonstrated better skill!

I was able to predict early on that Team 8 would win, and/or do very well based on their team behaviors. They invested in human resources that were tasked with improving the groups overall performance. Although I suggest this in the introduction, most teams ignore this function in exchange for more hands on the project. As it turns out, this “overview” role can have a dramatic effect on efficiency and accuracy by helping each part of the team have the correct tools, plan in advance how the separate parts will actually go together, study the completed robot so they know the overall picture, and answer questions and get solutions so the builders can keep working with limited or no down time.

Great job and thank you to all of the teams from YouTube Data, it was great spending a few hours with you and watching excellence in action!