The Wall
Issue 14 | March 2010
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officers: David Lubars, Bill Bruce, Creative Director: Mike Smith, Art Director: James Clunie, Copywriter: Pierre Lipton
Date
June 2009
Background
HBO’s show ‘Big Love’ is about a man who has three wives, all of whom lead complicated lives full of deception and lies. Every character has a secret and the tagline for the show is ‘Everyone has something to hide’.
Idea
To promote it, the agency created interactive audio posters featuring everyday people (not characters from the show) with jacks built into their heads. Passers-by could use the headphones from their iPods and music players or could use the headphones handed out by HBO street teams to plug in and hear the inner thoughts of the people on the billboard.
They discover one overweight man is wearing a slimming girdle; a woman secretly hates her baby. Another is a junkie for painkillers.
There was also a jack point where listeners could hear promo clips about the new season’s shows.
The installations were set up in Los Angeles at Hollywood & Highland and at Venice Beach and in New York’s Times Square subway station. In all, there were fifty boards containing (and revealing) over 70 secrets.
Results
The average interaction with the posters was over five minutes and many people listened to all the ‘secrets’. The New York Times featured the installations and 15 online magazines helped boost buzz for the show’s new season.
Over 900,000 pedestrians saw the installation in Los Angeles and there were 1,400,000 monthly impressions in New York.
Each episode of the series was watched by over 5,000,000 people.
Our Thoughts
Over the last couple of years BBDO New York has been nothing if not consistent in trying to create ever-deeper engagement between HBO and its core audiences. In 2008 there was the Grand Prix-winning ‘Voyeur’ campaign and in 2009 ‘The Cube’, another brilliant idea about the depth and power of the stories you see unfold on HBO, the USA’s most thoughtful TV channel.
With those ideas promoting the entire channel and now with this installation for a single show, BBDO, almost single-handedly, is turning outdoor into direct media. The poster is no longer a passive bit of art direction on a slab of plywood, it’s an invitation to pause and spend some time playing with a brand.