Hyundai Australia uses performance data to unearth the next generation of female surfing talent in new campaign via Innocean Australia
Innocean Australia has activated Hyundai’s partnership with Surfing Australia to launch ‘She’s Electric’, a platform giving women a pathway to the top by recognising and amplifying grassroots athletes on a national scale. Together, they are launching the very first grassroots women’s surfing leaderboard.
Leveraging LiveHeats performance data from Australian Boardriders Battles around the country, the national ranking unearths breakout talent across eight state rounds to give women a profile based only on performance. At the end of the season, the top five join Hyundai’s ‘Team Electric’, a sponsorship team to give female surfers the support and exposure they need to make it to the top.
Hyundai has also partnered with MurMur Mag, a new online female surf publication by pro surfers Tru and Jesse Starling, to produce the official ‘She’s Electric Pre and Post Show’ content series. Films on the site analyse the data and movements on the leaderboard and include interviews with some of the industry’s greats.
As the leaderboard updates, the live data informs all media and partnership touchpoints, promoting whoever is moving up the national ranks, including leaderboard round ups, top rider profiles, and the “Electric Moves” top five wrap-ups.
For launch, Innocean worked with pro surfer and Hyundai ambassador Laura Enever to create a surfboard with her words of advice. The “Shaped by Defiance” board will travel to each state round, passed on to inspire the next generation.
It has only been three years since male and female surfers were granted equal pay in WSL competitions. Whilst surfing has come a long way, there is still inequality in terms of participation, sponsorship and opportunity: one in three surfers are women yet represent just 10% of grassroots competitors.
Says Charlotte Berry, copywriter, Innocean: “Previously there was no national ranking to connect women boardriders around the country, all young female surfers were just anonymous numbers in singular events. The ‘She’s Electric’ platform drives real competition and reframes female surfing on the undeniable numbers, not vanity metrics. These numbers then affect the media, increasing the profile of the surfer consistently performing well to get her name – rather than her number – out there.”
Says Jennifer Gulliver, director of marketing at Hyundai: “Whether you’re from Trigg Beach or Torquay, Coffs Harbour or Kiama, for the first time we are levelling the playing field and growing competition wherever women surf – then at the end of the season, it starts all over again.
“Our new brand platform ‘Have you tried it?’, brings innovative thinking to tackle problems and defy barriers that have previously been accepted as the norm. As part of this, we’re using data to unearth female surfing talent around the country in real time, then providing them with a pathway to the top. This transformative approach creates a fairer playing field and helps tackle the underrepresentation of grassroots female surfers.”
Says Clarissa Pike, head of partnerships, Surfing Australia: “On beaches and Boardriders clubs all around Australia there are women discovering or rekindling their love of surfing, yet many of these faces are yet to be discovered. Hyundai wants to change this. Leveraging their marquee sponsorship of the biggest grassroots surfing event in Australia, the Hyundai Australian Boardriders Battle, the ‘She’s Electric Leaderboard’ taps into our goal to support and supercharge the trend we’ve seen all over the country of women surfing and will uncover the talented women that will inspire the next generation of girls to surf.”
At the end of the 2022/23 Hyundai Australian Boardriders Battle series, the top five athletes on the ‘She’s Electric’ Leaderboard are named Hyundai’s ‘Team Electric’, a Hyundai sponsored team given the support and exposure to make it to the top. This includes intensive training at the Hyundai Surfing Australia High Performance Centre (HPC) and $5,000 cash to support the team on their surfing journey.
Watch episode one of MuMr’s ‘She’s Electric’ pre and post show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJIJM0aTBjk
Innocean:
Copywriters: Laura Parker, Charlotte Berry
Art Director: Pamela Parrelli
CD: Damon Porter
ECD: Wesley Hawes
CEO: Jasmin Bedir
Client Partner: Ian Hartley
Senior Account Director: Vincent Pled
Account Director: Chiara Marotta
Design Lead: Michael MacGregor
Editor: David Anlezark
Producer: Gabe Hammond and Warrick Nicholson
Junior Integrated Producer: Brittany Mirabitur
Head of Production: Esme Fisher
Strategist: Charlotte Berry
Hyundai:
Jennifer Gulliver, Director of Marketing
Alex Pinsuti – Head of Brand, Product and Retail Marketing
Dominique Allen – Brand and Product Portfolio Marketing Manager
Ava Elvy, Social, Partnerships & Product Marketing Specialist
Surfing Australia:
Chris Mater – Chief Executive Officer
Clarissa Pike – Head of Partnerships
Danielle Hankey – Partnership Account Director
Chris Smith – Head of Production, Media and Owned Channels
Nimai Strickland – Senior Producer
Owen Milne, Sam Walkerdene & Jacob Wooden – Producer
With thanks to:
Live Heats: Chris Friend
Shaper: Dylan Longbottom
Surfboard Artist: Nathan Johnson from Blacklist Studio
Surfer and Hyundai Ambassador: Laura Enever
Murmur Magazine: Jesse and Tru Starling
16 Comments
Really love it, what a cool thought. Although I thought for sure I was about to hear Oasis’ killer song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_raDYEpeWg&ab_channel=Music
Nice idea. Just curious, how does the tech work? Maybe I missed that bit. Is it in the boards themselves?
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…so you have created a live female surfing leaderboard because there wasn’t one there before’.
And this is relevant because?
WOW, Hyundai and Innocean are killing it.
What next, a live leaderboard for the world chess champions?
@Wavemanker, the tech is all in the creation of a new leaderboard to unearth grassroots athletes. We have created a new metric that measures performance – an “average wave score”. The leaderboard aggregates the average wave score of every female competing in the Australian Boardrider’s Battle competition to create a national ranking that has never existed at a grassroots level before.
So good. Well done on getting this made Charlotte.
Similar to the google one aye
Sorry, this is a mess.
WHAT does surfing have to do with electric cars… or Hyundai?
HOW is making ‘a leaderboard’ a piece of tech – its an, ummm – spreadsheet? a table?
WHY does ‘grass roots’ sport need national rankings – isn’t that counter-productive to the spirit of grass roots sport, where it’s mostly about participation and bettering your personal best?
The biggest barrier to young girls participating in sport is fear of not measuring up.
Right… I know – lets make a national database to measure EXACTLY how far from an unrealistic benchmark they are…
This reeks of an in-house agency full of staffers desperate to stay on the industry radar.
Hoping this idea doesn’t come from the gendering of cars, with the new IONIQ (spotted in the film) being electric…
The national leaderboard is a nice ‘ideal’, but truth is it’s not an accurate or fair way to rank surfers when the conditions, competition and judging vary so much up and down the coast. Agree there should be more done to encourage and nurture future athletes, especially those that are female and who don’t have the profile to turn pro, but this isn’t the way to do it.
Water and electricity. A match made in heaven
Agree with unconvinced, but you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. A Korean company with electric cars is trying to align itself with women surfers, who are f-ing awesome btw, and not the weaklings the agency are trying to portray them as. Layne Beachley, FYI. But I love the fact that someone convinced a brand to spend money on something cool. The communications / idea is all a bit jumbled up.
In recent years a cause like gender equality did a good job of masking the waft of a poor idea. Unfortunately for Innocean, we now all have sharper noses.
So, it’s just a play on words. Electric cars. And women that are killing it, so much so, that they’re “electric”. Got it.
Go back and dig around for new tech that Hyundai is using and try and leverage that into a story that relates to what Hyundai does for the community (you’ll probably find that it has something to do with transport in some way).
It’s called a hand-in-glove idea. Because just a great fit and makes sense. Unlike this.
Everyone needs to grab a surfboard, paddle out and chill.
Hyundai have partnered with Surfing Australia. I’m sure Innocean didn’t play a role in that.
There job was to activate the partnership in an interesting way in what is a male dominate sport.
Purchasing a new car is predominantly a female decision. That together with Hyundai’s progressive tech smarts makes this idea work for me.
We should be applauding Hyundai for supporting such an idea. The easier option would have been to focus on the blokey superstars of the sport like most would have.
Instead they they are using their sponsorship to tackle a grass roots problem. That takes real guts.
Well done Innocean for doing something different. Ignore the small minded.
Complicated brains working here…