Home Brew partnered with HBO Max to deliver a premium and fan-servicing social media campaign to promote the 3rd season of DC’s Titans. With the show moving from the DC Universe streaming service to its new home on HBO Max, this campaign aimed to deliver an elevated yet insider experience to existing fans while also attracting new fans. The campaign was designed to emphasize the increased production value of the show and build a deep connection with the fanbase through community management. Home Brew focused on fan-service content and building relationships with the community to achieve the campaign goal of making Titans one of HBO Max’s most-watched and most talked-about series of 2021.
Titans tells the story of Dick Grayson, formerly Robin raised by Batman, and how he and other uniquely powered and passionate individuals come together to form a superhero team named the Titans. Titans Season 3 was a unique campaign due to a number of factors that heavily influenced the strategy. It was the first DC Universe show to have its season debut on HBO Max, it included a large ensemble cast and it had a passionate international fanbase while initially only being available to US subscribers. Being in-the-know and understanding the fanbase was the most important part of this campaign.
Our campaign primarily focused on Twitter with an always-on fanbase. With an incredibly Twitter savvy audience in place, our strategy was to be where they are and use platform-specific tools to engage with the fans in meaningful ways. The campaign on Twitter used Branded Hashtags, Twitter Watch Parties and a creative use of fan DMs that spawned millions of engagements and conversation.
Catch Up Campaign: Prior to the season premiere, we designed a Twitter-specific micro campaign to catch fans up on the previous 2 seasons. As part of the catch-up campaign, we hosted a Community Choice Rewatch party. To choose which episodes to watch we had fans vote on a series of polls. Over 2 days, we live-tweeted the winning episodes, which were programmed along with screenshots, GIFs, fun facts and pop quizzes. We DM’d some of the superfans to get quotes and dropped these in the episode threads. We had participation from cast members including Teagan Croft, Damaris Lewis, Curran Walters, Joshua Orpin and Chelsea Zhang and showrunner Greg Walker. We were also able to get another DC Original on HBO Max, Doom Patrol, to participate heavily in the Doom Patrol crossover episode which was a hit with fans who enjoyed the interaction with each other.
Twitter Watch Parties: In addition to the catch-up campaign watch party, we also hosted Twitter Watch Parties for the premiere and finale episodes of the season. In each of these watch parties, we enlisted the participation of cast members and the series’ showrunner to engage with fans in real time while we live-Tweeted about the episodes.
Branded Hashtags: Another key component of our Twitter strategy was leveraging a combination of character, alter ego and cast members’ actual names as the official hashtags of the campaign. Each branded hashtag on Twitter had an attached emoji which represented each of the many characters on the show, 15 in total and teased some of the series’ upcoming storylines like #RIPRobin which alluded to the death of the character Robin who would ultimately return as the villain of the show, Red Hood. These hashtags were revealed and supported through custom character videos that highlighted footage from previous seasons and included footage from the upcoming season to get fans excited.
By building a deep connection with the fanbase through community management and talent involvement, the Titans social accounts saw an impressive 32% page growth, acquiring 236k new fans. The accounts saw 10.7M total engagements and 338M total impressions over the course of the campaign. Our action- and character-driven social pieces raised the hype level and pushed the storytelling forward for both core and casual fans, helping us accomplish our goal of building strong relationships with the community and growing the audience. As a result of our campaign, Titans became one of HBO Max’s most-watched and most talked-about series of 2021.
