Following in the footsteps of HBO Original productions like Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Entourage, comes Flight of the Conchords, a new cult classic about two small town New Zealanders trying to make the big-time in LA. Karen Lai, director of communications at HBO Asia, talks to Television Asia Plus about tapping into the Conchords’ extensive on-line fan-base
1 November 2008
Overview
Singapore-based HBO Asia was launched in 1992. HBO Asia is able to bring the best of Hollywood to Asia first because of its exclusive licensing deals with major Hollywood studios - Columbia/TriStar, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. HBO Asia offers five 24-hour, commercial-free subscription movie channels - HBO, HBO SIGNATURE, HBO FAMILY, HBO HITS and CINEMAX, - as well as a subscription video on demand service, HBO ON DEMAND. In addition to the proprietary and award-winning HBO Original programs that are produced exclusively for HBO viewers, HBO works with a large number of major independent production companies to secure exclusive rights to a host of quality movies. HBO Asia is a joint venture of HBO and Paramount.
HBO has a viewing subscriber base of 31 million and is seen in 22 countries throughout Asia - including Brunei, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, People’s Republic of China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and on military bases in South Korea.
HBO is broadcast entirely in English with closed-captioned subtitling in Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, Cyrillic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese.
HBO premieres the latest and biggest blockbuster movies first on Asian television. HBO SIGNATURE offers groundbreaking and cutting-edge programs including award-winning HBO Original Productions. HBO HITS has Hollywood’s all-time greatest movies. HBO FAMILY offers wholesome, entertaining and fun movies suitable for the entire family. CINEMAX is the channel for fans of action, science-fiction and suspense movies. HBO Asia is staying ahead of the curve in the digital space by providing online users the convenience, ease of use and accessibility to information about HBO programs and its channels through Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and the HBO Widget.
As an extension of HBO Asia’s social networking strategy, for the first time ever, HBO Asia introduced a blog in conjunction with the premiere of the latest HBO Original Series, Flight of the Conchords. The blog (http://www.hboasia.com/blog/fotc/) is hosted on the Flight of the Conchords microsite within the HBO Asia webpage and is maintained by an HBO Asia employee who blogs in her personal capacity.
In an attempt to reach out to the potential viewers of this quirky and irreverent comedy series which resonates with the youth community, HBO Asia organized the ‘I Y Flight of the Conchords Trailer Contest’ via YouTube. HBO Asia has chosen to leverage on the popularity of this highly popular video sharing portal by creating a YouTube group (http://www.youtube.com/group/fotccontest) for the ‘I Y Flight of the Conchords Trailer Contest’ where home-made trailers of Flight of the ConchordsSM can be easily uploaded onto YouTube and linked to the contest page on the HBO Asia website.
To promote the ‘I Y Flight of the Conchords Trailer Contest’, HBO Asia organized a blogger event where key bloggers in Singapore were invited to tour the HBO Asia office and preview a few episodes of Flight of the Conchords. http://www.hboasia.com/blog/fotc/fotc-blogger-event/ outlines more about the blogger event and what the bloggers had to say.
Other online platforms that HBO Asia used as part of the campaign included icroblogging sites such as Plurk and Twitter. These microblogging sites were used to communicate with the targeted bloggers prior to the blogger event.
The current digital initiatives cater to viewers across the 22 countries in Asia in which HBO is available.
At the beginning of 2008, HBO Asia created a Facebook page and the HBO (Movie Buff) trivia game on Facebook. With the premiere of Flight of the Conchords on HBO in September, HBO Asia further leveraged Facebook by creating an additional fan page specifically targeted at fans of the series. HBO Asia leveraged YouTube for the first time with the launch of the ‘I Y Flight of the Conchords Trailer Contest’.
Flight of the Conchords is a perfect fit with Facebook and You Tube users due to the content of this edgy musical comedy series and the band’s current following on YouTube. We are very pleased with the success of our social networking attempts for Flight of the Conchords and will look at leveraging the digital space for our future programs if they are appropriately targeted for the online community.
Other than organizing HBO Asia’s first-ever blogger event at our office for key Singapore bloggers where we promoted the series as well as the contest, HBO Asia is promoting the contest through various means. They include partnering with Creative Technology Ltd who will be sponsoring their Vado Pocket Video Cam as prizes for the contest; working with tertiary institutions to disseminate the contest information to their students; incentivizing the readers of a few selected Singapore bloggers as well as online visitors to an online youth website – Youth.sg (http://www.youth.sg/content/view/6163/55/).
We are very heartened by the response so far. To date, we have received entries from Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore which include an animated clip and a duo rapping to their own tune. The contest is still ongoing and ends on 5 November.
We receive an average of 1.3 million pageviews to the HBO Asia site every month; we currently have about 3,500 fans on the HBO Asia Facebook page and an ever-growing number of subscribers to our mailing list. Our widget has been downloaded by about 2,000 computer savvy users as well.
The new initiatives are meant to provide our online users with the ease of use and convenience of accessing the information of the programs on our channels easily. By using the various online platforms, we are able to reach out to a target audience previously untapped.
These new initiatives help HBO Asia to reach out to the youth audience as well as boost the HBO brand among the youth community who consume most of their information online. Best of all, online initiatives are measurable and this will help us tweak our future online initiatives to suit our target audience.
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