As Official Connectivity Partner of Wimbledon, Vodafone worked with technology partner GiveVision to launch 5G enabled headsets at this year’s Championships, allowing visually impaired fans to watch live tennis like never before. The headsets stream live footage from local TV cameras and enhances it by stimulating the photoreceptors of retina cells, allowing fans with sight loss to follow the action in real-time, with their own eyes.
Using Vodafone’s 5G removed lag between the TV cameras and headset, making it possible to use this technology at a major event like Wimbledon for the first time, with previous WiFi-based solutions simply not fast enough to watch in real-time. Adding 5G also allowed fans to watch the action from anywhere in the stands, instead of being restricted to pre-determined ‘accessibility’ areas, which can leave people feeling excluded.
To tell an engaging story and deliver against comms objectives, Vodafone identified passionate visually impaired tennis fans to trial the headsets at Wimbledon alongside media, and created emotive video edits, a VNR and editorially focussed photography for both Vodafone and Wimbledon channels.
Distributing around a cluttered news agenda, the activity generated 132 pieces of coverage (99% featuring key Vodafone 5G messaging), smashing KPIs. Highlights included heavily branded pieces in The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Mail Online, BBC Sport, GQ and Forbes, whilst Wimbledon social content delivered 884,00 impressions.
63% of tennis fans felt more positively about Vodafone after seeing the initiative, and 41% were more likely to consider Vodafone as a result.
