Objectives

HBO's award-winning comedy series starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus returned in 2014 with its biggest season yet. After successfully growing the Veep social audience during season 2, HBO and GLOW once again joined forces for season 3 to give that larger fanbase exciting and rewarding experiences that amplified the show, which we successfully accomplished in record numbers.

Our goal was to increase audience engagement through excellent custom content, activate talent in Veep's social ecosystem, and find new ways to explore everyday mediums. In additional to pre-season and season-long show companion content and messaging, we pulsed activations tied to the season's major plot points, which provided rich opportunities for creative, thematically authentic executions. Pre-premiere, we wrote hundreds of custom dedications from Selina Meyer's for her "book," Some New Beginnings, and sent it out to both influencers and superfans. Next we launched a Robocall activation with social extensions using the hashtag #iSupportSelina.

As a result of this comprehensive campaign, Season 3 saw many record accomplishments:

• Record high Facebook engagement throughout the season, peaking at 161,202 engaged for the week of April 6, 2014
• Record high Twitter engagement, increasing nearly 300% from last season
• Quadrupling buzz in the season 3 finale:
  • Season 3 finale Twitter buzz was 561% higher than the season 2 finale
  • Season 3 finale was the show's most social to date

Strategy and Execution

Using major beats in the storyline from season 3 of Veep as social campaign themes to rally fans around, every activation had extensions across multiple social platforms—and even included some "old media" (Telephone calls! Books!) in the mix. Talent participation also helped tipped the scales on the entire campaign's success.

Activations Included:

Some New Beginnings Books: The S3 premiere showed Selina Meyer on her book tour for Some New Beginnings: Our Next American Journey. HBO and GLOW sent out of the "book" (a blank book made to look like Selina's on the outside) to superfans and influencers to gain and grow buzz for the premiere. All of the 100+ books had a unique book dedication from Selina handwritten on the inside cover. Recipients then shared that they received these exclusive personalized books on social.

Robocall: This was a dedicated #ISupportSelina (for POTUS) campaign phone line to which fans could call in and hear a custom recorded message from Selina Meyer's Director of Communications, Mike McLintock (played by Matt Walsh). After Mike's hopelessly incompetent/true-to-form message, users were prompted to text "VEEP" to a unique call code, after which they received hilarious personalized texts and a downloadable custom share card so they could show their support for the eventual (albeit fictional) POTUS on social media. Three weeks later, fans received a voicemail from Selina Meyer herself!

Voice Statistics

• 7,999 total calls received to the hotline
• 1,739 people were called via robocall
• 14,994 voice minutes used

SMS Statistics

• 18,533 inbound texts
• 21,351 outbound texts
• 39,884 total texts

Website & Social Statistics

• 13,073 pageviews
• 491 Twitter shares
• 282 Facebook shares
• 113 Tumblr shares

Veep Season 3 Results:

Facebook

• 12,356 page LIKES added
• 161,202 peak weekly page engagement (week of April 6th 2014)
• 109 page posts
• 68,639 page post likes (648 average likes per post)
• 4,640 page post comments (44 average comments per post)
• 5,145 page post shares (49 average shares per post)
• 3,892,218 page post reach (35,384 average reach per post)

Twitter

• 8,023 followers added
• 1,013 tweets posted
• 3,945 @mentions
• 6,855 RTs acquired (6.77 average RTs per tweet sent)

Tumblr

• 7,917 followers added
• 290 posts made
• 1,005 notes

Media