Young people in Russia are reading less each year – a three-fold increase in youngsters that declare that they do not read at all (over the past 3 years). As one of Russia’s biggest telecom brands, Beeline feels partially responsible for the decline in reading among younger consumers – a side-effect of their enthusiasm and addiction to smartphones. To help promote and restore the appeal of books, Beeline launched a digital project aiming to attract the attention of the progressive public to the relevance of reading through leveraging the country’s most popular music genre – rap.

As one of Russia’s biggest telecom brands, Beeline felt responsible for the decline in reading among younger consumers – a side-effect of their enthusiasm for smartphones. To help promote and restore the appeal of books, the company came up with a project, that leveraged the country’s most popular music genre – rap. By unwrapping the links between rap and books Beeline aimed to reignite youngster’s passion for reading.

We used semantic sentence embedding technology to find out all existing links between rap and literature. The technology transformed texts into natural number vectors to find syntactic, semantic and lexical similarities. The main challenge was to learn the neuro net to distinguish meaningful quotations from common phrases and coincidences.

Using machine learning we scanned the library of world literature and compared it to Russian rap tracks over the past 20 years. Semantic sentence embedding technology transforms texts into natural number vectors to find syntactic, semantic and lexical similarities. Hundreds of gigabytes of text data turned into 400 matches which were visualized on the project landing page. On the website you were able to explore the quotes and reminiscences from books that inspired the musicians and see how it’s all intertwined.

Every match led you to a specific book in the online library.

The project resulted in almost a million visitors, 2 minutes of average session duration.

Every third unique user shared the link to the page.

The conversation spilled over to TV and became the hottest national topic. The project got millions of media impressions. But most importantly, more than 1 000 000 pages were read in the online library.

The project resulted in almost a million visitors, 2 minutes of average session duration.

Every third unique user shared the link to the page.

The conversation spilled over to TV and became the hottest national topic. The project got millions of media impressions. But most importantly, more than 1 000 000 pages were read in the online library.