HBO Launches You Into Outer Space With Its #SelfieInSpace Contest

All of those times as a kid you’ve wanted to see yourself travel in a spaceship, the theme park rides that gave you an outer space feel and those times with friends where you pretended to be in the infinite deep dark sky have all been taken into consideration! Wondering how? An attempt to launch you into outer space has been taken up by HBO South Asia .

Objectives - 

For a TV channel their product is their channel viewed by millions of viewers and their customers are, you guessed it - The viewers.

Objectives of this campaign in particular were simple, get as many people tuned into HBO India the afternoon and the night of 21^st December, the day Gravity premiered.

Moreover generate traffic to the microsite created and have fans participate in the #SelfieInSpace contest.

Execution - 

The platforms included Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. All the users had to do was upload a selfie on the HBO page. HBO then would create a video of the " target="_blank">selfie being launched into outer space. That was pretty much the campaign that directed users to know about Gravity with a little fun attached to it.

Facebook

The execution started off by reaching out to its 3.4 million number of fans on Facebook.

On December 8^th the 1^st post went out and all of the following posts looked something like this.

The posts continued till the 22^nd till when the contest shut and what was received was over 30-40 entries on each post across all the days.

Twitter

The tweets flew in and the execution here was pretty basic.

1. Leverage the existing follower clout
2. Leverage influencer clout
3. Tweet blasts
4. Create conversations

Here’s how it all looked like.

Thank you for an overwhelming response to #SelfieInSpace. May the best selfie win. :) #StayTuned

— HBO India (@HBOINDIA) December 22, 2014

@HBOINDIA @Xbox keep calm n watch gravity tonite #SelfieInSpace #snapchatarmy pic.twitter.com/N8ZwoZS1eI

— Pushpendra (@pushpendra3955) December 21, 2014

@HBOINDIA #SelfieInSpace pic.twitter.com/RLhPXcXxnm

— Amit Mahajan (@bluedevil_666) December 21, 2014

 

@HBOINDIA #SelfieInSpace Celestial Selfie:) pic.twitter.com/045G4PurkF

— Ekta Khatri (@ekta_k88) December 20, 2014

The countdown has begun. Matt Kowalski and Ryan Stone will see you in space now. ‘Gravity’ premieres today at 1pm and 9pm. #BBOM — HBO India (@HBOINDIA) December 21, 2014

Now or never, movie lover. Share your captioned selfies today and grab a chance to win an @Xbox 360 with Kinect. #SelfieInSpace #Contest

— HBO India (@HBOINDIA) December 19, 2014

Tweets kept flowing in with ‘n’ number of selfies and it kept flowing in.

Towards the end a winner was selected and the video was uploaded to YouTube.

YouTube

The premier video which didn't have much to do with the campaign premiered on the YouTube channel.

The winner of the campaign had a video launching her into space which was pretty much the highlight of the campaign. Here’s what that looked like.

Microsite

To add to the fun microsite powered campaign was created which asked you for your details and simply upload a selfie. It also additionally asked you to write in a small message and leave the rest to the HBO India team.

Positives - 

The connect of the game and the concept to the movie was a step in the right direction. Selfies though overdone come with a twist.

The twist justified the means and the end was a video launching into outer space as promised which was a quite a video in itself.

The giveaway was an XBOX 360 with Kinect, that in itself would have people want to play given the giveaway selection from the HBO team.

The platform selection included everything from Facebook to YouTube to the microsite too.

The video created was pretty inclusive too with elements of outer space to give a space-like feel to everything.

Starting early too helped gather huge numbers all pointing to bringing in viewers for the premier day.

Scope for Improvement - 

The concept of selfies has been severely overdone. Though each of these come with variations, the central idea is yet the same.

To push out the idea more, the microsite could have been marketed heavily, simply to drive traffic as against leveraging the social platforms solely.

Conclusion - 

The campaign did garner some hefty numbers and as a result bought in a great participation to the campaign. How did this result into final viewership is a tough call to make but with regards to the campaign it did quite some justice to putting the word out there.

Could this have then been seen as an additional mechanism in order to bring in people over and above the already existing viewers of HBO on TV. Definitely! There’s still a large number of users who may have loved the movie and even have wanted to see it and may not have been regulars viewers of HBO. The social space filled that gap.