THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!
From the 6th Annual Shorty Awards

@girlshbo Instagram

Finalist in Instagram

Objectives

One of the Top 10 Most Shared Brands on the platform, according to Adweek, the Girls Instagram profile has developed into a social currency inherent to the digital and overall marketing presence of the series. We have curated a presence for the show on Instagram since its launch, and Instagram remains a key source for fans of the show to engage with their favorite characters, themes and episodes year-round. To build anticipation for Girls Season 3, we employed the new video feature of Instagram to seed out exclusive content to fans. Launching the Season 3 campaign with an Instagram-themed “In Production" clip shared on Instagram and on HBO, we continued fanning the flame with a 15-second teaser trailer that the show’s creator and star Lena Dunham shared to her profile. The consumer reaction and positive press attention from the likes of Mashable and Refinery 29 driven from this clip alone helped us surpass 1.5 million YouTube views on the trailer’s digital release —just in the 3 days leading into its on-air premiere. The Girls fans are never satiated, and the video offerings continued through the season 3 tune-in campaign. We gave fans an unprecedented look behind the scenes of the poster shoot, and to round out 2013, introduced a fun and topical Instagram-only video series starring Lena Dunham. Girls’ nearly 200,000-strong following on Instagram makes it one of the pre-eminent brands on the platform. We drove tune in for 2013’s Season 2 with Sunday-night posts of the most Girls-awkward or iconic moments, and kept fans eager for the new season with similar content during hiatus. Timely content relating to the series and pop culture and fond holiday greetings remain fan-favorite content pieces that delight and surprise followers regularly. This season, we chose to double down on creating content for our thriving community. Launching our campaign to the largest possible audience, we simultaneously fed the HBO’s Sunday night viewers and the Girls Instagram profile with a first peek at Season 3 footage -- using nothing other than Instagram-inspired creative. Having received the aforementioned recognition as a top-shared brand on Instagram from Adweek, we moved on to the next tactic in our Season 3 campaign: the official trailer release. Targeting the Girls superfan evangelists, we employed Lena Dunham’s Instagram profile as the venue for a 15-second mini-trailer that teased what was to come when the full trailer was released days later. Gaining nearly 50,000 likes, the teaser was praised by Mashable as having “prov[en] the storytelling potential of Instagram's 6-month-old video feature," where Vulture asserted that it “might be short, but it still has everything we need to get jazzed for season three." The early digital release drove major press buzz, with the @NylonMag Twitter handle declaring “OMG: The season 3 trailer of @girlsHBO is heeeere!!! Best Friday ever?!" To keep buzz going between the trailer release and the early 2014 season premiere, we kept the momentum going with exclusive video from behind-the-scenes of the Season 3 poster shoot. Saying goodbye to 2013 with a bang, we premiered our first installment of a brand-new Instagram content series on New Year’s Eve. In Lena On Hannah On, Lena Dunham shares what Hannah would think about a variety of topical subjects. The first piece, which shared Hannah’s take on New Year’s Eve festivities, left fans with something to look forward to in 2014 – more Instagram content from their favorite Girls.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

HBO

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Entry Credits