HBO Voyeur: Success or Failure?
by: Paul Saarinen
The HBO Voyeur project was the brainchild of BBDO New York chief creative officer David Lubers, and others. It was executed by several other supporting specialty agencies for online, and outdoor. It took home a fistful of awards, even taking the grand prix award at the Cannes International Advertising Festival. While I’m not aware of the judging criteria, it is safe to say the project was considered one of the best designed, and most creative among the advertising community. It certainly gained a lot of attention from the awards, but was it a successful project? Did it have success metrics? Were there any key performance indicators? Did the client make any revenue at the end of the day? What was the ROI for HBO, the client?
While the original website for HBO Voyeur is down, you can view an archived version hosted by the original creator, BigSpaceShip. I have yet to find any statistics for the original site. What was the bounce rate, and average time spent on the site by viewers? Were there any conversion tactics involved? In essence, what was the goal of the site, and did the project succeed in that goal?
Update: readwriteweb.com has a piece which mentions the alexa traffic ranking, and comment on the decline of traffic
The project also had a blog, where viewers could comment on posts about that delved deeper into the different aspects of the campaign. Compete.com traffic statistics are included below for the blog: thestorygetsdeeper.com comparing it to hbo.com and sho.com traffic numbers.
So maybe the goal was to create conversation, and users definitely didn’t have a ton to say on thestorygetsdeeper.com. Maybe they talked a lot about it on forums, their own blogs, or somewhere else?
Below is a Google Trends search report comparing a few shows. You’ll see Voyeur does come out of the gates fast, but collapses just as quickly. The news coverage jumps at the time of the awards announcements from Cannes.
The original video was also placed on Youtube.com. It garnered 117k views and 19 comments to date. Google blog search resulted in 234 results for “hbo voyeur” while removing “cannes” and “awards” from the results.
While the big industry news story was this project winning awards, and even bigger yet, generating industry conversation on who should be given credit for these awards, the big loser it seems, was HBO. I have yet to see an article, blog post, or mention of how this project was successful for HBO. Maybe it was just an experiment for them. It could have been a loss leader for the next generation of HBO programming online, or a template they could modify for new programming. All awards aside, the project seems to have missed the biggest area of opportunity online. Creating conversation is a big indicator of the engagement level of a program of this nature. If I were BBDO New York, or BigSpaceShip, I would think twice on how they could have driven more and better conversation to the existing storyline. Maybe next time.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
paul isakson
Very good questions. The only thing I found with any hint at results was the case study video on Creativity:
http://creativity-online.com/work/view?seed=3a6dc647
I think the key thing to remember here is that this was just a marketing campaign, not an actual show. Its purpose was likely just to reinforce that HBO makes provocative original content.
It was also out for a relatively short time, thus the spike you’re seeing on the Google Trends chart. This leads me to believe that when people realized it wasn’t a show, they were done talking about it.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for it, there does appear to be confusion among consumers between this being a show and a campaign. I know when I first started seeing the teasers on HBO for it, it did lead you to believe you were watching a trailer for a new show.
Nov 16th, 2008
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Jan 30th, 2010
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