With three months to go until its Centenary, Telefónica is launching what will be the most special year in its history. The company wants to celebrate this unique milestone, with its team, its customers, its shareholders, and the society through various initiatives that will take place in the coming months, with special intensity around April 19, when it will be one hundred years since the constitution of the Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España (CTNE), its first name.
One hundred years of constant transformation that have allowed Telefónica to go from being a voice services operator to a technology company prepared for the challenges of the digital world with a vocation to achieve a positive impact and “make our world more human by connecting people’s lives”, its corporate purpose.
Last December, the first institutional campaign associated with the Centenary, “Besos” (Kisses), was launched. The spot shows the evolution of technology since 1924 and how, thanks to it, Telefónica has connected people through a gesture as human and simple as a kiss. In a second phase, the campaign has used big data tools to reveal that Telefónica’s networks carry more than 10 million kisses every day.
“Besos” is the first launch of “Imaginémonos”, the brand platform with which Telefónica wants to communicate the different initiatives of a Centenary that looks much more to the future than to the past.
Also, through “Besos” the Centenary logo has been unveiled, a brand image that adapts the usual logo to the 100 years being celebrated and which will accompany the commercial brands (Movistar, O2, Vivo, Telefónica Empresas, Telefónica Tech…) throughout the year.
“Telefónica is approaching its Centenary as a springboard to the next 100 years,” explains María García-Legaz, head of Telefónica’s Centenary Commission. It is a historic milestone that allows us to look with pride at our past and with all our enthusiasm and drive towards our future, and this is how we want to share and celebrate it. This is the starting point of the “Kisses” campaign, and the spirit that we want to permeate all the initiatives of 2024″.
Documenting history
The Centenary website
Telefónica launches its Centenary website, www.telefonica100.com, a site specially designed and developed to offer a journey through the history of the company through a selection of pieces from its documentary archive – which has also been digitized and catalogued to mark the anniversary. The website, conceived as an interactive timeline, takes us from the past to the future and will grow with new content as the events of the Centenary take place.
The cataloguing and digitalization of the documentary archive is one of the major projects developed by Telefónica and its Foundation for the Centenary. More than 60,000 pieces -photos, videos, audios, and documents of all kinds from the 1920s to the beginning of this century- that show the history and evolution of Telefónica through its employees, its buildings, the different technologies and devices, international expansion, advertising… An essential legacy that will be digitally archived forever.
www.telefonica100.com is also the showcase for some of the testimonies collected in “Telefónica Voices”, another of the projects linked to the Centenary with which the sound legacy of this century has been collected. More than a hundred talks with all kinds of people linked to Telefónica in recent decades who, with their testimonies, help to draw the most human face of the company.
Telefónica Universe
Due the Centenary, the company has launched another initiative called Universo Telefónica, that wants to collect testimonies and memories from as many of the company’s employees as possible over the years. Both the current team and people who have worked at Telefónica at any time and in any country can access the site set up for this purpose, www.telefonica.com/universo-telefonica and complete a simple questionnaire.
This list of professionals will serve to create a large community of “Telefónica people” and to share common knowledge and experiences. To date, more than 15,000 professionals have registered in Telefónica Universe.
Celebrations throughout 2024 with special intensity in April
In addition to the events directly linked to the Centenary, this unique year will be reflected in all the events in which Telefónica is regularly present. These are some of the initiatives planned:
- Next February, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Telefónica will hold a unique concert at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in which classical music performed by the prestigious Chinese pianist Lang Lang will coexist with cutting-edge technology.
- On 19 April, the Centenary Day, it will culminate with a great concert of classical music at the Teatro Real in Madrid with institutional representation.
- Also on April 19, PLAN100, the action plan launched on the Centenary in which nearly 30,000 Telefónica employees around the world signed up, will come to an end.
- Employees and their families will be at the center of the celebration as the protagonists of these one hundred years of effort and commitment. The doors of many work centers will open to celebrate the Centenary together on the weekend of 20 and 21 April.
- On May 18, a great solidarity concert will be held at the Santiago Bernabéu.
- The last and decisive stage of the Vuelta Ciclist a España will be an individual time trial starting from Distrito Telefónica in Madrid and arriving at the historic venue of Gran Vía 28.
Leaving a legacy for the future
In Spain, the Centenary will coincide with the culmination of the transformation process of its fixed infrastructure. Around the anniversary date of 19 April, Telefónica will switch off all its copper exchanges and will be the industry leader among European and Latin American companies in completing this transition. When the process is complete, a network conversion will have been achieved that will include the closure of a total of 8,532 exchanges.
On for Fundación Telefónica, they have launched the ‘Imagine the future we want’ cycle to give a voice to different thinkers, researchers, intellectuals and scientists and to think together about how to build a better future today. A cycle that was created with a view to the celebration of the Centenary and which has featured such important figures as the Pulitzer Prize winner, Jane Smiley, and the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah.
In the second quarter of the year, it will take place the new permanent exhibition “Exponential. From analog to digital”, an exhibition that under three ideas: Speak, Live, and Imagine, explores the growing impact that the development of telecommunications has had on all areas of our lives. From the appearance of the first telephones in the 19th century, to the arrival of the Internet, mobile telephony or artificial intelligence, the exhibition shows the change of social paradigm derived from the arrival of each new technology and the human stories that surround it.
Finally, and among many other initiatives that will be unveiled during these months, Fundación Telefónica will present the Centenary Book, which collects and documents this century of activity through the great stories that define the company; and Movistar Plus+ will premiere a documentary that reflects Telefónica’s role in people’s lives over the last hundred years.
