Yota is the world's leading 4G operator and the favourite brand of young, digitally connected Russians. Yota Play is a new online movie service created with their social behaviour in mind. In a market in which it is almost unheard of to pay for digital content, our challenge was to change people’s perceptions of online movie services in general and Yota Play in particular. We needed to get them to start talking about Yota Play, to consider trying out the user experience of a socially movie service. We needed to find a way to be relevant in their daily lives: How could Yota Play be injected into their lives and add value to their conversations?

We realised that motion pictures, the main ingredient of our service, has the magic potential to make any status update, tweet or email come to life. Great actors tend to have a way with words and our huge film library is full of them. We figured they could help people to express themselves.The idea:Let the movie stars say what's on your mind. Cinegram enables you to create and send online video messages via social media to friends by combining short movie clips.Cinegram is an innovative social tool that makes Yota Play become an intrinsic part of all kinds of everyday conversations, while their great movies are always just one click away. Your social media ramblings will become much more enjoyable when they come delivered by Brando, De Niro and Nicholson.

With Cinegram, Yota Play invented a new form of social media messaging, while reminding their audience that watching movies is a truly social experience and that Yota Play is movie service worth trying out. Since the concept is an application that makes your social media messaging more engaging and entertaining for yourself as well as your friends, the media plan is built into the campaign idea. We hope that the majority of our users will find us through being sent a Cinegram or having heard people about it; however, we also used online ads, traditional PR, and WOM.

Every Cinegram user is invited to watch a free movie on Yota Play. Yota's ambition is for the campaign to generate 1m unique visitors, 300,000 new registrations and 25,000 purchases. However, the campaign has just launched, so even if it looks very promising, it's too early to talk about the results, but we hope we'll get the opportunity to update the jury with the results as they come in.