THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 13th Annual Shorty Awards

Promoting the Launch of HBO Max on Venmo

Winner in GIFs

Audience Honor in GIFs

Objectives

HBO Max was eager to celebrate its streaming service launch in May 2020, but due to the pandemic, the company needed to find a new way to reach consumers virtually during its "A Week of So Much More" campaign. HBO Max was forced to rethink their strategy, pivoting to a completely digital launch. The brand found that messaging environments were the perfect place to reach people and drum up excitement for the new service and content offerings. 

With the goal of gaining widespread pre-launch consumer attention by showing up in an unexpected and delightful way digitally, HBO Max partnered with messaging technology company Holler in creating an exclusive, animated branded sticker set for use on Venmo. Branded GIFs, or animated stickers, provided Venmo users with appealing and dynamic content to spice up their transactions. What’s more, Venmo is a leading payment platform that has been largely untapped by the entertainment industry, meaning the campaign was uniquely positioned to reach target eyeballs.

Through this partnership, HBO Max was not only present on a popular platform, but the brand also leveraged a smart contextual targeting strategy powered by Holler Suggestions technology to surface HBO Max branded GIF content in relevant Venmo payments at the right times. The suggestions allowed HBO Max to surprise and delight people with relevant, useful and humorous content from key streamable classics like The Sopranos, The Wizard of Oz and Friends, ultimately improving their payment experience while building a positive relationship with HBO Max.

Strategy and Execution

With the goal of connecting cult classics to everyday payments in mind, Holler’s in-house Holler Studios team got to work illustrating and animating a set of original branded stickers for HBO Max. It achieved its goal by taking the ownable IP of shows and movies — like the Wizard of Oz, The Sopranos, Friends, The Flintstones and Sex and the City — and thoughtfully associating them with popular Venmo payment topics — like food, rent, rideshare and drinks. 

Results

HBO Max’s unique branded sticker campaign on Venmo had a massive 21% campaign share rate, meaning one in five people who opened the pack selected and shared an HBO Max Holler Sticker in their payment note. 

Drilling down a bit into the specific content, HBO Max saw success in hyper-relevant conversations. The “Sopranos Take Out ” sticker was associated with food payments on Venmo and had a share rate of 5.25%. This is huge in comparison to the Holler Platform benchmark of 0.80% in terms of share rates. This particular sticker was even among Venmo’s top ten most used stickers that week — indicating how resonant and appealing the sticker was for users. 

On Venmo, the majority of the content soared above the benchmark; the Wizard of Oz “No Place Like Home” sticker garnered a 4.29% share rate, mainly tied to rent and housing payments. Even the HBO Max logo sticker received a stellar 3.56% share rate and was among the top three performing stickers within the branded pack. 

Overall, the campaign was a smashing success, proving that brands can reach people effectively on digital platforms in a short period of time. It also showed that HBO Max’s brand tone resonated with users and that they excelled in providing fun, useful content to relevant conversations. That’s what we call an iconic campaign!

Media

Video for Promoting the Launch of HBO Max on Venmo

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Holler, HBO Max

Link

Entry Credits