HBO
Building Equity with Gen Z
The Challenge
How do we get in with the crowd that 'Netflixes'? Netflix isn't just what Gen z steams, it's engrained in their habits and social currency. As cord cutters, Gen Z's awareness of HBO as streaming platform and TV channel are low and they wonder why shows are unavailable on Netflix. HBO came to Virtue to help build a brand connection with college students to increase overall brand awareness and consideration. Create a scaleable stunt that will engage the college audience with the HBO brand.
Company
Virtue Worldwide
Year
2019
My Role
Account Director: Responsible for account success from brief to delivery, category and brand business acumen, client communication, and internal cross-functional leadership.
A NEW TAKE ON THE “HOME BOX OFFICE” IS BORN
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A NEW TAKE ON THE “HOME BOX OFFICE” IS BORN |
The Approach
For college students, privacy is more premium than HBO, so we created something to give them their privacy back in the most Home “Box” Office way possible. The HBO Box was developed to give dorm dwellers privacy from their roommates and launched via a spoof tech product announcement video.
To deepen engagement and UGC with college students, a limited supply of HBO Boxes were created for a three-day sweepstakes with Fooji that anyone with an active college email address could tweet to enter. In five key college markets, we had same fulfillment and nationwide, three day fulfillment.
The Activation
We worked with two influencers, @AverageFashionBLogger and @NathanZed, known for humor based content that have large college-aged audiences to promote the campaign. Each created custom content about why they would need the box and provoked followers to share their stories too.
HBO Ambassadors on college campuses (118 nationwide) were asked to submit proposals on why they should get a box IRL and how they would promote it. The top 10 received the boxes and their socials were promoted with paid via HBO to increase scale. All other HBO ambassadors supported the program on campus, sharing it on their channels. This program was managed through the HBO team to support the overall program.
The Results
“Sure, you can always just punch some holes in an old refrigerator box and call it good, but wouldn't you rather have the fine craftsmanship of a HBO Box, instead? As HBO says in the commercial, ‘box is literally [their] middle name.’ Enjoy!”