The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2022
SAS builds an AI batting cage that coaches swings and teaches kids data literacy
Analytics firm SAS made data tangible with a first-of-its-kind smart batting cage: 50,000+ data points per swing and real-time coaching for kids.
SAS
What it had to solve
SAS is an analytics company whose work lives in spreadsheets and models, and children were meeting data only as abstract schoolwork. Baseball offered the venue: a sport where performance is measured every swing, so data could be felt rather than explained.
How it works
SAS is an analytics company, and analytics is invisible: it lives in dashboards and models that most people never touch. Children in particular were meeting data only as schoolwork, so the idea of caring about it had to be manufactured somehow.
SAS chose baseball as the venue. The Batting Lab is a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered batting cage that tracks a batter's stance, weight distribution and ball-flight statistics, collecting over 50,000 data points per swing. Every swing is compared in real time against an optimal form, a model built from thousands of swings by elite players, so the cage itself coaches the child.
The result was a place where getting better at baseball and getting better at data were the same activity: the child improves because the model reads their swing, and the model's reading is the lesson. D&AD carries the work in its awards archive.
Why it lands
- The product demonstrates the company's craft instead of asserting it: SAS's own modeling is the coaching, shown working in front of the learner.
- The lesson is self-interested rather than forced, since children want the feedback the data provides.
- Fifty thousand data points per swing make the experience credible to anyone who doubts that analytics matter.
- It plants data literacy in the age group that will need it, making a marketing idea double as an educational one.
What it did
The cage turned analytics into an experience: children felt data improve their swing instead of being told data mattered, and SAS demonstrated its modeling working on a physical skill. D&AD carries the first-of-its-kind work in its awards archive.
What you can take
To teach an abstract discipline, give it a physical consequence: when a child sees data improve their swing, the case for data literacy stops needing to be argued.
Since then
The Batting Lab became SAS's showpiece for marketing with a purpose: coverage followed the 2022 launch, the initiative earned a social impact award in 2023, and the D&AD awards archive carries the case as an example of digital experience design.
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