Creative Agency: Deep Focus
In the vein of the recently popular "team" t-shirts that highlighted celebrity rivalries (Aniston/Jolie, Nicole/Paris, Nick/Jessica, et cetera), street teams distributed "Team Atia" and "Team Servilia" t-shirts to tastemakers at upscale boutiques, coffee shops and magazine shops in NY, LA, Philadelphia and Chicago as a gift with purchase. The shirts featured the URL of the microsite, TeamAtia.com or TeamServilia.com, which offers a user-friendly introduction to the feud between Atia and Servilia, as well as to the show in general through a video timeline, a trailer for the upcoming season and other interactive elements.
In addition, static ads featuring faux paparazzi images of women in the t-shirts ran on the most popular blogs, including PerezHilton, The Superficial and Overheard in NY and drove traffic to the microsite.
The campaign was a success, with the Team Atia vs. Team Servilia microsite receiving well over half a million page views in the first few weeks-- as well as thousands of requests for the t-shirts. In addition, top bloggers have also put in requests for their own shirts.
-- Sabrina Caluori, account director, Deep Focus
This site gives the "Rome" fan a chance to take sides in the feud: T-shirts that let people show off which side they're on; or folks can break down the vital stats of the feud to fuel any Atia vs. Servilia discussions that might pop up.
For me, someone who's invested in several HBO series but never got into "Rome," it gives me a chance to quickly get up to speed with the "Follow the Feud" video timeline. In roughly three minutes, I'm caught up on a major conflict of the show and I didn't need to spend 10 hours watching TV.
Other networks should pay attention to this site. The TV series is trending toward complicated plots and reduced instant accessibility (think "Heroes," "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" or "Battlestar Galactica"). For this series trend to strengthen (which I hope it does), you have to be able to ramp up a new audience without asking for a 10-40 hour commitment in watching reruns. This site is a model for doing just that.
-- Brian Linder, associate creative director, Click Here
One way to integrate the blogosphere into your marketing campaign is to build a fake blog, written by a fake blogger, and start pumping your product guerilla style. Problem is the audience you are hoping to reach is one that is so jaded and sophisticated they reject traditional advertising messages. Think they aren't going to see through that tactic? To promote HBO's Rome Deep Focus wisely choose to try to woo the bloggers who have already established credibility with their audience rather than try to create fake ones.
For better or worse we are a culture defined largely by our celebrities. We develop deep bonds of affection for these famous strangers and, as a result, we will gladly spend our money on products related to or endorsed by them. For Rome, HBO's historical drama with a competent but relatively celebrity-free cast set in an equally celebrity-free era, one would think there'd be little opportunity to capitalize on our collective obsession with celebs.
Deep Focus created a promotion built around these Team Atia and Team Servilla t-shirts that played off the Brad fueled Jen/Angelina ruckus. The real genius of the campaign was to make the shirts the star while leveraging the internet and the blogosphere as a t-shirt delivery mechanism. Rather than build a fake gossip blog that pumped up the rivalry between Atia and Servilla, Deep Focus provided established gossip bloggers with Team Atia/Team Servilla shirts to give to their readers. Deep Focus also built a website that offers clips of the show, vital stats on Atia and Servilla and another chance to win a t-shirt. The site was fine, nice clips, fun UI (though the entry form to win a shirt was a little hard to tab around in), but for me the whole campaign was about those shirts that managed to leverage modern cat-fighting celebrities to promote a show about ancient Rome.
-- Patrick V. Barrett, senior interaction designer, Bazaarvoice
Moral depravity. A country's leader caught cheating on his wife. Another leader responds with violence, even murder. Sex, lies, violence, deceit. No, this HBO website is not promoting a show of our past and current President; it is engaging our attention in its new show "Rome." The saying goes that the front man is merely a puppet and it's the woman behind the scenes who holds the true power. HBO's "Atia vs. Servilia" campaign website takes this unique, ruthless woman angle to capture our attention to its storyline, and I must say that I'm hooked.
The interactive site is most engaging in its use of movement in the thumbnail video clips in the top featured "Follow the Feud" section of the site. Each thumbnail is accompanied with a short storyline and seduces the web user to click on it to see the full video clip. As you'd expect, the video production quality is top notch, and the site accomplishes its goal of educating the viewer about the show's background. Other strong elements on the site include the online poll "Whose team are you on?" where the results are immediately displayed (62 percent root for the especially vicious Atia).
If I was an HBO viewer, I'd begin recording the new season of "Rome" on my DVR so I didn't miss a single episode; however, it seems a bit early to gain the loyalty of viewers to feature T-shirt sales of characters that have never been seen on TV before. I'd also like to be personally pulled into the story and video on the site-- now that would make it especially worth passing along to a friend. Regardless, I think this viral campaign site hits the mark and engages the user throughout an entire storyline, which is so much more powerful than simply a long video trailer. Bring on the treachery and deceit-- I'm watching now.
-- Ryan Buchanan, president and CEO, eROI