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It’s Not Cable; It’s HBO On Demand
By Shirley Brady
Eric Kessler isn’t concerned that The
Sopranos® is on ice until early 2006. The HBO president
of sales and marketing isn’t worried that Sex
And The City® has left town for good. He’s
not anxious that Curb Your Enthusiasm® and Six
Feet Under® may not return until after next Labor
Day.
That’s partly because Kessler is confident in
HBO’s upcoming lineup (which includes the June
premiere of the Tom Hanks-produced series Big Love
and the $100 million miniseries Rome in September).
It’s also because of the success of HBO On Demand®,
which is now in more than 5 million homes.
HOD accounts for about half of video-on-demand requests
in HBO homes, “significantly reduces churn” and
is generating its own watercooler buzz, Kessler says.
For instance, HOD homes sampled Curb Your Enthusiasm® in
unprecedented numbers and helped boost ratings for
its linear third season.
To keep bringing folks back, lengthy previews of new
series—the first 18 minutes of Entourage, the
first 12 minutes of Family Bonds—were added to
the On Demand lineup before the linear premieres.
That savvier approach to leveraging its powerhouse
brand, not to mention some of the best programming
on television, is extending to HBO’s cable affiliates.
“
We adopted a new approach in the past year,” says
Bernadette Aulestia, VP, subscriber marketing and brand
development. “With distributors on both sides
focusing on their multiproduct strategy—HD, DVRs,
SVOD—their attention is on how to package all
these multiple products.”
Affiliates asked the brand to suit up in more battles. “The ‘one
size fits all’ model—the one big promotion
or big idea per quarter—is not what they need,” says
Aulestia. “Instead, they’d say, ‘What
we really need is to focus on these three elements.’”
A website (dubbed Quick Response Creative—Brandopoly’s
ASP Solution) for downloading and customizing affiliate
marketing materials was launched, and the direct marketing
group was charged with coming up with customizable
and flexible plans for each distributor.
“Affiliates can now see us as the sexy brand
that humanizes their products,” Aulestia says. “Whereas
we used to call these one-offs, one-offs are basically
our life. Everyone’s in different stages of their
rollouts [so] it’s about meeting their needs
at that moment with something unique to what they’re
trying to accomplish.”
New campaigns in 2005 will help drive DVRs and telephony, “with
some markets even talking about ITV,” she adds. “We’re
looking at ways we can imbed our content into all these
new product lines.”
Here’s one suggestion sure to please subscribers
pining for Larry David and James Gandolfini: ring tones
playing theme songs from The Sopranos® and Curb
Your Enthusiasm®. Now that’s sexy affiliate
marketing.
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Press:
:: It's Not Cable; It's HBO On Demand
:: From the Trenches: ABC Television
:: ABC Builds Its Brand Behind
The Camera
:: A Hi-Tech Image Update:
ABC Using Internet to Distribute
New Graphics to Affiliates
:: Brandopoly Brand Management
is Ready For Prime Time
:: Brandopoly Expands Into
New Office Space
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