Our Work
HBO Comedy Climb
Background
For decades, the HBO brand has been synonymous with entertaining original programming that garners droves of zealous fans. In the spring of 2008, HBO tasked Buddy Media with creating a Facebook application that would appeal to current fans of its comedy shows, while raising awareness of the availability of many popular titles on DVD. Buddy Media promised an engaging app-vertisement designed to deliver social brand advocates who would evangelize the brand through frequent activity on the HBO Facebook application.
Objectives
- Build an engaging Facebook social app-vertisement to drive sales of HBO Comedy DVDs
- Deliver a loyal audience of social brand advocates by driving thousands of unique visitors to the HBO Comedy Climb Facebook application
Solution
Buddy Media conceptualized and developed the HBO Comedy Climb application to drive sales of HBO DVDs by highlighting the madcap humor of HBO original comedy programming. The app-vertisement was a simple quiz application with a social twist. Users were given the opportunity to build a career in virtual entertainment by correctly answering questions about specific episodes of Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras, and Flight of the Conchords. After an extensive research study, Buddy Media determined that applications that provide users with a chance to strive for performance benchmarks achieve high levels of engagement and repeat usage over time. As a result, we built the HBO Comedy Climb to provide users with challenging goals to strive for on their way to the top, while giving them the chance to improve their ‘career standing’ in the entertainment industry. A challenge mode that catalyzed competitive impulses amongst friends helped the application ‘go social.’
In addition to the development of the app-vertisement, Buddy Media spread the brand’s messaging across the social graph through a highly targeted Facebook marketing campaign. Thousands of consumers used the HBO application as a conduit to the HBO Video website, where they subsequently purchased the HBO Comedy DVDs.
