Indiantelevision dot com's MAM Special Report : Blockbusters made HBO simply the best!

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Blockbusters made HBO simply the best!

Indiantelevision.com Team

(19 October 2002 4:00 pm)

Home Box Office is the international English Movie TV channel distributed by Turner in India. HBO was launched in September 2000 in India. Part of the AOL Time Warner group; HBO is an immensely successful channel in the US and many parts of Asia.

Starting as a completely unknown entity, without Star's bouquet advantage, HBO had to establish itself as the movie channel that showed the latest English blockbusters.

The HBO strategy was built around one basic consumer insight: There is no loyalty among movie channels - The viewer heads to the one with the biggest title.

Working on this assumption, the idea was to literally scream from the rooftops that HBO had the biggest and the latest to showcase.

A key issue was catching and keeping the movie buff: Not all movies are very big blockbusters. There are a host of good movies that might not fall under the blockbuster category so a key issue was to keep getting viewers into these "Level 2" movies. The audiences that watch these movies form the core of HBO's loyal viewer base.

Its primary target audience were educated, urban, young adult. Demographically, the HBO viewer would be 16+, living in a 'well-off' neighboured.
Its main objective was to create 'noise' about HBO and the blockbusters airing on the channel. So it focused on big Saturday Night movie and showed movies like Mission Impossible, My Best Friend's Wedding, Forest Gump, Stuart Little, The Matrix and Jerry Maguire.

The strategy was to leverage these movies and their big star casts and bring the viewer to the HBO fold. Therefore the issue before HBO was to keep getting viewers to the channel to watch these movies. HBO created identifiable reasons and occasions to watch good English movies.

It used specially packaged 'stunts' to keep the viewer's eyeballs riveted to the TV. Two such stunts were the Valentines Day 2001 and Oscars 2001 specials. Given below are how these campaigns were delineated.

Features	Valentine's Day 2001	Oscars 2001
Product offering	Back to back romance movies on HBO.	Oscar winning movies in the post-prime slot every weeknight.
Target audience/Task	Urban youth including teenagers and college students.	Most-of these movies had already been aired individually on HBO, the task therefore was to package it as a Festival of Oscar Movies.
Media	HBO innovatively used the Valentine's Day classifieds and written messages from a boy to a girl in mainline dailies.	HBO used a silhouette of the Oscar man and text-wrapped the page 3 (the "social happenings in city" page) of a leading dailies' supplement.

In addition to airing blockbusters, HBO is renowned the world over for its critically acclaimed Original Movies and TV series / TV mini series. It created the desire to watch series like The Street and Band of Brothers that, unlike English movies, are not 'familiar titles' for the Indian viewer.

HBO exhaustively used full pages and double spreads in leading dailies to promote itself in addition to radio and outdoor across the metros. It also added advertising in Cinema halls that screened English movies to catch the core of our audience.

After ensuring viewership for the biggest blockbuster of the month, HBO's 'Simply the best' became top of mind among consumers.

Benefiting from last year's experience, HBO had slated two Oscar movies everyday - evening and primetime slot. It leveraged this edge to create a campaign that delivered "32 Oscar Movies" at prime time message in a humorous and effective way.

HBO today commands tremendous recall among English viewing TV watchers. To reaffirm that, HBO has embarked on a metro city tour to hear what people have to say about HBO and put their, testimonials' on air. Another step towards 'keeping the loyal base glued to HBO.

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