AUSTIN, Texas — Steps from a crush of scooters and throngs of tech hipsters munching on food truck fusion tacos, HBO has created another universe.
Last year, HBO made headlines for its creation of a slice of"Westworld" just outside town. This year, the company tried to top itself with an experience that drew about 3,000 visitors over the course of three days in Austin. HBO went to great lengths to make the experience feel authentic until you step into a room full of Red Cross nurses with sterilized needles for blood donations. Some 80 actors were outfitted in costumes shipped in from the show's sets in Belfast. They don't break character, sticking to a roughly 100-page script created for them, and they even worked with a dialect coach.
HBO, which is now owned by AT&T, was joined by all its rivals for subscribers in the battle for attention. "We need to do something that the customers will talk and will use social media, utilize social PR to help spread the word and extend our marketing just beyond traditional advertising," said Mike Benson, Amazon Prime Video's marketing chief."Creating a unique experience here at SXSW is important because it's become such an influential audience that is vocal not just here in Austin but all over the world.
"The programs and the original content that we are started to put on Prime Video is relatively new, and so the more that we can do to tell people that what we've got, it starts to add value. So we've seen significant return on investment with our marketing dollars that we put into the marketplace because we see that people either sign up for Prime or they maintain their Prime membership because they are watching the content we have and they are watching a lot of it.