HBO - Black History Month
Case Study: My 21st Century Dream – 2006 Black History Month
Client: HBO
Media Used: Internet
Objective:
The goal was create brand awareness and drive tune-in for HBO’s Black History Month programming, while acquiring new HBO and HBO On Demand subscribers.
The Challenge:
In order to achieve HBO’s goals we needed to develop a brand awareness and direct response campaign. It had to engage the target audience (African Americans 18+) and direct them to HBO’s Black History Month and On Demand websites for programming information and a special DVD offer designed to sign-up new customers.
The Solution:
Since the primary goal was to drive online traffic to the HBO website, we used interactive media. Once we identified the appropriate online publishers, we took an ‘ownership’ position through an exclusive sponsorship with a single publisher (BlackPlanet.com). This allowed us to capitalize on a highly targeted audience and maximize media spend. HBO became the exclusive sponsor of “My 21st Century Dream” National Essay Contest, which entitled them to exclusive branding of the essay contest microsite and supporting ROS media. Participants were asked to write a short essay interpreting Dr. Martin Luther King’s, “I had a dream” speech. At the end of Black History Month, one winner would receive an all expense paid trip to New York City, for an African American cultural tour. As part of sponsorship agreement, HBO also received highly visible branding across the BlackPlanet.com Homepage, site pages, essay microsite, dedicated email newsletters sponsorship, text links and tags. These units included roadblocks, full page post-logins transitionals, leaderboards, rectangles, skyscrapers, and buttons. All creative was tagged and linked with unique three different URLs to specific pages on HBO.com, including the DVD offer page. This enabled us to drive traffic through multiple channels to access the Essay Contest, HBO’s Black History website, HBO’s on Demand site and the exclusive DVD offer. Most importantly it allowed us to optimize the campaign off clicks and offer page views to satisfy both branding and acquisition objectives.
The Results:
The campaign was an outstanding success. From a branding standpoint the campaign over-delivered by 50% thereby lowering overall planned CPMs and increasing delivered media value by as much. Acquisitions over-achieved conversion rate goals and brought the target cost per acquisition down by 30% of planned.