Tele2 is the fastest growing mobile operator in Russia. It was the last one to enter the market but just in a few years became number 3 player in the category. Telecom services became a commodity nowadays, with a similar level of connection quality and coverage. So, it is crucial to grow brand relevance, make brand attractive for potential subscribers. It can be achieved by demonstrating that the operator understands people, acts in the interest of its subscribers, supports their lifestyle, provides relevant brand experience. Young generation of mobile users is very important for the operator. This audience is especially hard to attract. Young people are not interested in advertising, they respect deeds, not words.

To stand out among competitors we decided to work directly with sub-cultures that are growing in popularity among youth in Russia.

Approximately, it takes up to 850 falls for a skater to make 1 single successful trick. But without a proper video he can’t even prove that he did it. Video making process causes a lot of frustration and discouragement — a rare friend, let alone a professional operator, will agree to wait for a successful trick for that long. With that in mind, we decided to give every skater a tool to automate that task. So, we created 4G SkateCam, a new video shooting and editing solution that connects to your mobile device. SkateCam consists of 5 4G hi-definition cameras, equipped with face recognition technology. This system films your tricks and assembles them into a video. You can edit it, customize with music and style, and upload to the internet. Now, any skater can get an access to easy-to-use tool for filming and editing tricks.

We have analyzed and compared the popularity of various sub-cultures among 16-25 y.o. in Russia. We found out that skateboarding culture is the fastest growing trend all over the country. Communities of skaters and their supporters exist in many cities and they grow every year. Skaters are brave and skillful, persistent and result oriented. They seemed to be great audience to connect with and to convert them into brand ambassadors. Tricks of the skaters are spectacular, so they could become a great content for social media, powered by Tele2.

Moreover, by creating a solution for skaters, Tele2 could attract a much broader audience - anyone interested in street culture, extreme spots or just looking for entertaining content online. During the year of pandemic restrictions, when public events were banned and young skaters lost opportunities to surprise their fans offline, the support in creation of content for online became especially relevant.

4G SkateCam is an advanced network of hi-definition 4G-cameras, able to recognize a skater via face recognition and automatically make a video out of his tricks. After SkateCam recognizes a skater, the network synchronizes all the cameras, allowing them to put all the frames of the skater in a necessary order. Then cameras transmit frames to the cloud via 4G, where they are assembled into a video. Cloud renders the materials and sends them to the user's account. Then one can edit it online, adding different effects and music using a friendly web interface. Finally, when the video is ready, it can be directly uploaded on instagram and other social networks. The technology is fully developed and have been launched at skateparks in 3 cities of Russia: Moscow, Ekaterinburg and Perm in September-October 2020. The project was announced via own social media groups, thematic blogs and influencers.

As the concept test has shown, the project increases Tele2 brand relevance among 16-25 y.o. audience by 58% (from 36% among unaware about the project to 57% among aware), brand consideration by 64% (from 39% to 64% correspondingly).

Total reach of the project over 2 million contacts.

This is the highest ever increase among projects targeted at younger audience.

The project is scalable - it can be implemented in any location where mobile connection is available.

During 4-week pilot period in September-October 2020 over 50 thousand people visited skateparks in 3 cities, equipped with 4G ScateCam. Thousands of skate videos were created by the riders and shared in the social media, including the most popular in Russia: VKontakte and instagram.

Now Skateboarding is an Olympic sport and we hope our technology gives talented young skaters a chance to get noticed and a proper motivation to keep on practicing.