HBO’s Silicon Valley
The Season 2 marketing challenge was to expand and diversify the viewership among males 18-34 . As the Digital Marketing Director, I designed a campaign strategy that converted more Game of Thrones fans, comedy enthusiasts, and gamers to tune-in to Silicon Valley, while still exciting our core audience of tech enthusiasts.
The digital marketing campaign exceeded expectations on all fronts. We acquired new viewer segments, drove online engagement far beyond our goals and executed first of their kind programs for HBO. There are three components to the campaign which are particularly noteworthy.
Director of Digital I Go-To-Market I Creative Strategy I Social & Influencer I Paid Media I Strategic Partnerships I Content Strategy I Cross-functional Leadership
Chattin’ Thrones
We convinced Game of Thrones watchers to remain tuned-in to watch or stream Silicon Valley and it translated into a significant growth in viewership. We created 10 short clips of the Silicon Valley cast members “Chattin’ Thrones” and leveraged the content to target Game of Thrones viewers via paid, owned and earned media. The content series generated around 2.5M views, earned praise from fans and press outlets such as Mashable, A.V. Club, Esquire and IndieWire.
Twitch Stunt
To reach gamers, cast members visited Twitch for an hour long live show which involved a series of firsts for HBO. Hundreds of thousands of Twitch subscribers tuned in for the event. Prior to the live stream, the stunt generated a ton of press from around 25 news outlets such as Variety, Entertainment Weekly, Engadget, AdWeek.
In Season Story Extension
We engaged the tech community throughout the season with a variety of online easter eggs. We refreshed PiedPiper.com each week with new blog posts written from Jared's point of view and designed to reflect the storyline each week. When the Pied Piper team announced the expansion of the team after episode 3, we surprised viewers with custom "Pied Piper is hiring" advertising that was targeted at employees who work at tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft.