HBO

How HBO Europe Used Personalized Video to Strengthen Customer Relationships

109 000

unique videos generated

14

countries

44.2%

conversion rate

2020 was an especially difficult year for so many because of the Covid19 pandemic and a lot of us got through the long lockdown days with the help of streaming services like HBO. So when HBO Europe began thinking about their traditional end-of-year Christmas campaign, they wanted it to create a playful and nostalgic sense of comfort but also be sensitive to the general public mood.

The concept and script were created by the Konektor Social agency and the solution was to create a meme-generator that felt like a personal christmas present from a friend. The message aimed to create a memorable personal bond between HBO Europe and the subscriber, to remind them of the quality and entertainment factor of HBO while also showing that they were aware of the challenging year that they had gone through.

A Personalized Meme-generator

Konektor turned to Motionlab to carry out the personalization element of the campaign.

HBO viewers were asked to fill out a simple questionnaire on a microsite, which reflected their daily lives in 2020 and covered subjects like socialization, exercise, work and travel. By choosing from 3-5 predefined answers, the viewer was then assigned scenes from some of HBO's favourite content to make up the final video.

With this data, Motionlab produced a personalized video that was quickly sent back to them to watch and share. The video combined clips of HBO shows with some dark humour to remind us it was a year in which our initial plans didn't quite turn out as expected. It also showed the viewer, that despite the best efforts of Covid19, it was another great year for HBO content.

The campaign was run in 14 European countries across the HBO Europe territories with a language-specific variation for each country. It was promoted on Instagram, Facebook, PPC and using influencers with the hashtag #myhbostories.

One of the unique challenges for Motionlab on this project was the required speed of the generation of 100k+ on-demand rendered videos while retaining the highest quality. Videos were created within approximately 4 minutes of receiving the data. When the campaign began to take off on social media, demand became very strong.

HBO process of the campaign

The Results Exceeded Expectations

The campaign resulted in over 300,000 visits to individual websites and 109,018 unique videos generated across the 14 countries. The average conversion ratio across all landing pages was 11 times higher than usual. In the Czech Republic, over 21,000 videos were generated with a conversion rate of 44.2%, and in Slovakia, over 70% of website visitors created a video. Almost 25% of people used the opportunity to share their video on social networks or downloaded it to their device.

The success of the campaign has led to it being shortlisted for three awards: the SABRE Awards for the EMEA region (from 2000 projects), the Fenix Content Marketing competition and the prestigious Zlaty strednik competition in the category of "Sport, entertainment, art, media, tourism and gastronomy".

In July 2020 it was awarded first prize in the category for Best Video and its Use at the Fenix competition.

“We were looking for an interesting kind of campaign to include a personalized trailer to expand upon the traditional Christmas campaign that HBO regularly produces. We looked at the Czech market, to find someone who could create something like this, and the cooperation took place over several months. So far, this pan-European campaign has exceeded expectations.”