The Danish Kingdom of Scartel

My dear telecom analyst, pervert-tanuki.livejournal.com , hiding his real face and name (although there is information that he is a certain employee of Tele2), prompted me to share with you, my dear% Pichugin’s blog (http : //igor-pichugin.livejournal.com), who once worked for Yota.

For marketing and PR, the result of the restructuring was the dismissal of half of the people from these units. This execution was done by someone Dominic from the London agency who developed the entire corporate style of Yota. The Englishman for some time suddenly became for Denis the most authoritative marketing guru (although in fact he is a designer). In March, the British began to develop a new marketing concept for Yota. However, no conceptual activities have so far been observed; probably the English concept was not too good.
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PR work was done by the hired agency Apostol Media. Recently appeared and specializing in online promotion, it “distinguished” in February, when the “apostles” were given the opportunity, as an experiment, to do something on the Internet for Yota. They began to send on the forums and blogs the so-called Yota-bots with unobtrusive mention of the name of the company. But some blogger-thousand worker is a matter of glades and wrote a post about the fact that Yota is engaged in spamming. His post came out in the top 10, had a resonance, and the company then had to make efforts to hush up the scandal.

About the agency Apostol and Scartel, I had the imprudence to argue not so long ago in the expanses of my favorite Habr. Friends, what can we say about a PR-agency, which besides a twitter with one tweet has a corporate website , which is an empty (!) Blog on the word-press platform?

By this time, the Moscow office of Yota had a new marketing director. He was recruited from VimpelCom, where he was engaged in advertising and, of course, had no relation to PR. Not surprisingly, in preparing for the Yota summer announcement, the guys managed to screw up again.

We are talking about Vladimir Dobrynin. I, unfortunately, know almost nothing about him. Therefore, I will give a pervert-tanuki comment: “ Mr. Dobrynin, widely known in narrow circles, was one of the participants of the nomadic marketing circus Popov-Jeremichev-Dobrynin, whose tour on the MSS-Sonic Duo-Beeline route became the talk of the town hall, though the last stage of the route was as they say, for some members of the troupe forced . "

It turns out that everything is simple: the Apostle Media agency is owned by Tina Kandelaki (she talks about him in her blog). And Tina is friends with Mr. Adonyev, one of the investors and shareholders of Yota. Recently, one journalist in his blog wrote that Yota pays "Apostle" 4 million rubles a month.

Under this business, the company begins to grow at an extraordinary pace. StarLab is a division of R & D. In the yard at the same time - the height of the crisis, and all companies, on the contrary, reduce staff. Starlabom is headed by Sasha Shtuchkin, a computer genius and winner of the Olympiad. He is only 23 years old, and under his command at some moment there are at least 250 people. Denis, who is just 31 years old, is very proud of the youth of his team (Starlab's general director, in particular) and often emphasizes this in interviews. For Starlab they recruit young computer geniuses like Sasha, sometimes even schoolchildren. They treat their director without much piety and immediately dispute almost all of his judgments.

When Yota switched to the commercial exploitation of the network, the “personal account” written by the youth became the cause of that “horror of the end of the month” that almost all Yota users encountered more than once. At the end of the month, everyone came to the site to replenish their account, and the “personal account” from overload stopped working, so much so that the starlabovtsy for several days could not find the cause of the failure.

My envious ego would like me to lead a team of 250 at 23 years old. However, my mind tells me that it’s almost impossible to manage such a unit at the age of 23. It's not about knowledge. The point is experience. A brilliant inexperienced programmer will not cope with the crowd of students and schoolchildren who do not even understand what work is. For them, it's fun. Plus pocket expenses.

In fact, product marketers could not properly calculate the business model for mobile IP-telephony, and then they decided that it was unprofitable. And the techies said that there is simply no space for voice in the network, which is already heavily overloaded with data

It's not even interesting who thought up this creature, and why this layout was approved. Why none of those approving saw this ambiguity. Usually such things are approved or disapproved by Denis Sverdlov. This is his holy right: the right and left hands of the CEO usually say: "The main thing is to make Denis like it." He expresses his opinion concisely: “I like” or “I do not like” (the author’s spelling is preserved). I could not find any system in this “like / dislike” it.

It is only clear that Denis likes Apple and Steve Jobs and he tries to be like him. Who saw how he represented HTC MAX 4G in the House of Music, agree with me. The problem is that Denis is not the most important appraiser of ideas in the company and his “like” can easily change to “not like” under the influence of shareholder Sergey Adonyev, who takes an active part in operational management.

Denis constantly emphasized what a youth, creative, highly professional team he has. But for some reason, professionalism in the company is not honored, his number is definitely not the first. This is what amazed me the most - in such a high-tech business. However, the company has developed some kind of distorted value system. For example, numerous kinship and friendships make a big disturbance. Two vice presidents - a husband and wife, two more - a brother and sister. The first regional network appeared in Ufa - because there it was necessary to take over the case of a relative of Denis’s wife. There are many classmates and classmates of Denis, former associates of Corus Consulting (Denis is a co-owner there) at high positions in the company.

What can I say, if Denis's father, as I heard, is Mr. Adonyev's old friend.

All of this is similar to the way Peter the Great played with real “funny troops” from real people in his childhood. Only in the case of Peter, we received the Emperor of All Russia. Now Sverdlov and Shtuchkin are playing “build the telecom operator”. Moreover, careless children are easily chased out of the sandbox, who by their playing did not fit Sverdlov.
I don’t even want to talk about family ties.

Original article pervert-tanuki.livejournal.com/165407.html

upd: For information. Igor Pichugin worked for many years in Kommersant. One of the best telecom journalists . “At one time I was dragging [on myself] the i-One project.”