Our first hybrid event with Pitcha involved the governor, mayor, and other ministers of Saratov riding the tram with Sber's top managers while participating in a quiz about their hometown.
The task: Create an interactive service that would gamify the experience for event participants, sharing interesting facts about Saratov and Sber’s new products in a fun way.
📖 Backstory
In October 2020, Sber (which was still Sberbank a few months earlier) decided that Saratov needed a new hero—a green tram with the iconic S, B, E, and R letters on it. The tram was impressive! Almost like the Tesla of trams. First, it was electric (a revolution, right?), second, it had a large interactive screen and USB chargers inside, third, it could follow a pre-planned route, and fourth, only well-dressed people in suits and coats could afford to ride it (at least, that’s who showed up on October 16th). The tram even had a GLONASS module, probably to make it easier to find in case it got stolen.
For a few hours, this new green tram became the temporary residence of several respected people from Saratov (and probably beyond). Everyone was there (including USB, as mentioned earlier): the Governor of Saratov Oblast, the Mayor of Saratov, ministers and their deputies, and a few top bloggers from Saratov who were supposed to cover the event on Instagram.
To make the trip more interesting, an excursion was given while the new piece of public transport rolled along. But the event organizers rightly pointed out that it would be great to engage the first passengers with an intellectual quiz about the city. And since Sber was gifting the tram, they also wanted to show the presence of the green bank and show its new services.
📦 The Client’s Request
Provide a service for gamification and engaging event participants (tram passengers), make the ride more interesting, and subtly showcase Sber’s new services. The total number of participants was no more than 50 people.
What was unusual? On one hand, the task seemed pretty standard. We regularly run quizzes for much larger audiences, so organizing another one seemed simple enough. But usually, during a standard quiz, we also have a live stream on our platform, where the operator knows when to bring up each question or poll. However, no one was planning to broadcast anything from the tram (despite the fact that it had Wi-Fi), and why would people in the tram need to watch a stream of their own ride anyway? Sending an employee to Saratov to run the quiz wasn’t feasible due to budget constraints and common sense. So, we decided to redesign a standard page, remove the player, and leave only the interaction form. The agency’s representative, who was also on the tram, signaled us via Telegram messages when to display the interactive elements. Despite the “hacky” nature of this solution, everything worked smoothly and on time.
But the pressure was on. Whether Sber had this tram sprung on them and they wanted to get rid of it quickly, or the idea to entertain passengers with a quiz came at the last minute, we had about 70 hours from the client’s request to the ceremonial boarding of people onto the green electric tram. This meant there was no time to launch a separate domain or set up servers, and we could forget about any grand design for the page. Fortunately, Sber’s brand guidelines were fairly minimalist, so we just threw together a white landing page with green elements.
As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t have time to launch a separate domain. Well, technically we could have, but there was a slight chance that the site wouldn’t display for some people since the DNS servers might not have indexed in time. The quickest and most reliable solution was to create a page on our website at pitcha.ru/sber. However, the client wasn’t too keen (really not keen) on promoting our service among Saratov’s political and blogger elite or having our domain printed on their handouts. So, we came up with a simple solution—displayed a QR code on the tram’s interactive screen.
🏁 The Outcome
The excursion took place. “Eron don don,” thought the politicians as they rode the tram into the unknown parts of Saratov. They were given a tour, 38 tram passengers participated in the quiz, and the Governor proudly secured 9th place in the individual ranking before heading off to attend to state matters (not by tram, though). Besides the quiz, questions about Sber’s new products and services were also displayed on the screens of the high-ranking passengers' devices, with active buttons allowing them to explore more.
Unfortunately, we didn’t think to track whether the mayor or any of the ministers registered for Delivery Club or Citymobil, and now the logs have been wiped. We can only hope that they did.
