She’s Electric
Hyundai x Surfing Australia
Unearthing the future of women’s sport on performance, not looks.
Surfing is synonymous with Australians, but the sport has a big problem:
1 in 3 surfers are women, but only 10% of junior competitors are female (AusSport, 2021).
In a sport that judges surfers on vanity metrics, Hyundai transformed their passive Surfing Australia sponsorship into an opportunity to innovate and establish a progressive way to unearth breakout talent using technology.
Connecting live competition data from Australia’s largest junior surfing events, Hyundai created the first women’s national ranking to give every athlete a profile based on real-time performance-data. The bigger their score in the waves, the bigger their exposure in the media.
Notably, She’s Electric picked up a silver in the Clio Sport awards.
From anonymous numbers, to athletes.
No national ranking existed for grassroots women.
The best way to identify up-and-coming athletes is breakout performances. Australian Boardriders Battle is scored as a team, where women were anonymous numbers grouped with men.
For the first time, we pulled female scores around Australia into one leaderboard.
LiveHeats™ data measured power, flow and speed, aggregating an Average Wave Score linked to each unique rider profile.
Now every woman could be discovered regardless of team or location.
Never in surfing history has a mixed-event separated scores to spotlight women.
Top 5 made sponsorship ‘Team Electric’
Throughout the season, the bigger the score, the bigger the profile - culminating in the top 5 athletes becoming part of a sponsorship team given financial support and intensive training at the High Performance Centre olympic training centre.