When Alex Diamond, vice president, global originals marketing, HBO & Max, first joined HBO almost 12 years ago, the TV viewership market was a lot different.
“The streaming landscape completely changed the game for everyone,” says Diamond. “Now with cord cutting, all of our marketing is driving towards Max so that we can get eyeballs into the streaming service and then ultimately, have them stay there.”
Marquee shows are a key driver to maintaining subscribers, so the return of True Detective –one of the network’s biggest shows ever– was a big deal. After almost five years since the previous season, Season 4: Night Country aired in January 2024. It occurred with the 10 year anniversary of the series and the marketing team wanted to make a big deal of the return of this iconic show.
The show itself was innovative at its launch a decade ago – being one of the first television shows to feature A-list movie stars– a common occurrence today. The new season brought with it an update from a show which was originally created by and starring men. The latest chapter has a dominantly female voice starring Jody Foster and Kali Reis, led by showrunner Issa López.
“It was a fresh female perspective. In many ways we were talking about it as a mirror of Season 1,” says Diamond. “Season 1 was male-focused and set in Louisiana. It was dark, hot, and sweaty. True Detective Night Country was predominantly female, very cold, arctic. Everything that we did was grounded in that strategy, we leaned into the cold part of it quite a bit.”
The campaign included TV, billboards, digital and social, as well as out-of-home stunts that brought the crime scene of Alaska to the streets of Los Angeles and New York, where fans could find Easter eggs and interact with show references. The brand also sent companion viewing kits and swag to influencers, and hosted early screenings in partnership with the Alamo Drafthouse for passionate fans.
Strategically, one of the main objectives with the series was to bring back True Detective fans and attract new viewers. “We knew with the changing landscape and Max becoming a big player in the streaming game that we had a fresh opportunity to bring in new viewers, in particular, a female audience,” says Diamond.
“It was not only a moment for the series, but a moment for the brand to signal that True Detective and HBO and Max are starting the year off with the bang,” he continues. “We definitely wanted the series to feel like it was connected to the True Detective lore that had been established in the previous three seasons.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Diamond to talk about the True Detective return, growing subscribers and how the streaming business has changed over the years. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What was the story you were trying to tell in the True Detective campaign?
For any crime show, you’re setting up what the stakes are of the season. It’s very clear in the first episode what happens to the six missing scientists and we bring in our two lead detectives and they’re here to solve the case. We leaned into the crime, the mystery, the disappearance, the setting. We had our critics embargo lift right at the top of the year and the reviews started coming in and they were really positive. We quickly flipped the switch from a narrative sell to a robust critic sell because the critics were talking and everyone was raving about how True Detective was back with a vengeance and it’s can’t miss TV.
This was a long campaign. We had our first asset out last April, about nine months before the premiere. It was tied to the campaign when HBO Max became Max. We released teasers and trailers on Streaming Day for some of our biggest shows that were coming up and True Detective was one of them. The show premiered in mid January. So right before Christmas, we really started from a paid perspective and promotions and everything –this crescendo of marketing activity all happening at once.
What are your key takeaways from this and how will you apply it to the next shows?
This show was unique in the sense that it’s a limited series. It was only six episodes. To put it in context, Game of Thrones seasons were running 13 episodes per season. This is something that we really wanted people to get into early. But if you do get in a little bit late, there is still a big opportunity to catch up and binge because people are not going to feel so daunted that there’s going to be 24 weeks of this, like in the old broadcast days. Things have changed a lot.
It was definitely an opportunity for us to think about it from a strategic perspective to get people to be there on day one. But also to build FOMO and buzz around what’s happening, which is what we did by focusing on positive acclaim and really strong press. There weren’t a ton of competitive dramas happening at the same time in the marketplace either. We had an A-list movie star with Jodie Foster and we caught fire.
How did you tap into the fan base?
The True Detective fan base is very passionate in many ways. There’s this army of fans. It’s hard to live up to those expectations but from a marketing perspective, we are really mindful of how we speak directly to those fans so that they feel a part of the campaign. Ultimately these are the people that we really need to be the early hand raisers and spread positive word-of-mouth ahead of a series premiere. Fans are going to either love a show or they’re not. That’s not necessarily something that we can control. We can control how we reach them, how we talk to them, how we curate discussions with them.
Can you talk about how you use this anchor type show to drive subscribers?
We definitely think about the calendar not only with HBO shows, but Max shows in general. My team works on HBO and Max originals. We work very closely with our scheduling teams. We’re going from The Regime into The Sympathizer into House of the Dragon and later this year, The Penguin. We want to bring people in and have them watch, that’s really how we think about audiences for Max streaming. Now so much of how we evaluate the success of a show is how much that show is able to ultimately convert new subscribers and drive business.
There are certain shows that just have the ability to bring in new subscribers on an annual basis, like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. On a year-by-year basis, people are coming in and churning out based on that content. It’s really our job along with scheduling to figure out how we can collectively tell a cohesive brand story so that we can have subscribers not only coming in for the show but staying for the next show after.
How has marketing changed since you joined in 2012?
When I started, it was the post-conclusion of The Sopranos. Game of Thrones was just getting started. Girls was the next big thing. We were pretty much solely focused on viewership, conversation, acclaim, and awards. We used the idea of the show breaking through the cultural barrier as a way of measuring the success of our content. Girls, for example, was the show that people talked about and it was just part of the conversation.
A lot has changed, particularly as we’ve gone from different parent companies from Time Warner to AT&T and now to Warner Brothers Discovery. The whole business of television marketing, streaming marketing has changed so much. I worked on the last few seasons of Game of Thrones and it almost feels like a different world ago. Since then, you have so many other streaming services that have launched from Paramount+ to Peacock to Apple TV and Disney+. At that point, it was probably just Netflix and maybe Prime Video.
The HBO brand is still, in many ways, a crown jewel brand in the entertainment landscape, but consumers are going to follow the content. The amount of content that is out there now is about 10x the amount of when I started – somewhere around 800 new shows are coming out a year– so you really do have to stand out. When we have the opportunity to market these big shows, whether it’s House of the Dragon or The Last of Us, we can take big swings. We can really stand out and still be what HBO represents. The biggest difference is just how much we have to stand out.
