A impressive amateur running event activation by Hungarian Telekom, called ‘Race TV – Telekom Vivicittá’, saw the sponsor of the 32nd Telekom Vivicittá Spring Half Marathon in Budapest produce personalised race videos for every single competing runner.
In total around 11,500 customised videos were produced for all the participating runners so they could watch themselves competing in the event in slow-motion.
As a personal gift from the sponsor, each runner was sent, via a direct email, their own customised race film within four hours of crossing the finish line.
The creation of this unique technology in Hungary was supported by Hungarian Telekom and based on the idea of MEC communications agency. The team of developers included MEC Wavemake and Poms Cloud Ltd.
This Central and Eastern European initiative, developed for Hungarian Telekom with agency MEC Wavemaker and Poms Cloud Ltd, ended in the development of some bespoke technology just for the activation.
This saw high speed cameras along the route produce 10 million frames (at 120 frame per second) over six hour period: a tech task that resulted in a rendering 1.5 terabytes of data into individual videos using 400 cloud-based computers in only four hours.
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The emailed customised race videos generated an impressive, record open rate of 74%.
In total, 35% of all runners downloaded their own personal videos, while a further 10% shared their films after finishing the race.
The agency claims that this is ‘a hundred times better than the share rate of an average Telekom fan page post’.
Each of these shared videos averaged a total of 200 views, making the total audience of sponsor’s race videos 20 times bigger than the total of all the participating runners.
With 10 million pictures turned into 11,500 individual films in just four hours, this kind of impressive sponsor activation demonstrates just how far things have come from the days when mass participation running events used to be timed by hand.
This campaign adds to the increasingly impressive catalogue of stand-out marathon marketing we’ve seen over the last 18 months.
Amoung our favourite recent running sponsor activations are Virgin Active’s ‘Second Finish Line’ ambush stunt (see case study), New Balance’s ‘My Future Self’ Comrades Marathon campaign (see case study), Samsung’s Tel Aviv ‘Marathon Game’ (see case study), Snapchat’s ‘Run, Snap, Make History’ initiative at the LA Marathon (see case study), plus Paramount’s Baywatch ‘Slow Marathon’ stunt (see case study), and, of course, Nike’s blockbuster #Breaking2 (see case study).
Links:
Hungarian Telekom
https://www.youtube.com/user/MagyarTelekom
https://www.facebook.com/TelekomHU
https://www.instagram.com/telekom_hu/
MEC Wavemaker
http://www.mecglobal.hu/mec-wavemaker/
Poms Cloud Ltd
