It wasn’t the first groan-inducing HBO Max ad I’d seen. But it was the first one that a lot of other people seemed to have seen. Last week, an ordinary, ostensibly harmless banner ad for the upcoming streaming service went viral on Twitter. You see, unlike 99.9% of all banner ads, it was more than just a tiny digital nuisance. It was disgusting to these people. In it, Tony Soprano, the TV character who signals prestige more than any other, was crammed into a tiny box with Chandler Bing and the main guy from “Big Bang Theory.” Enraged Golden Age of Television nerds recoiled at Tony’s placement alongside characters from sitcoms, a less self-important genre. Other, more pedantic users took offense at the ad itself, either pointing out that the copy could be read as “Where meets meets bada bing bang” or registering their shock at the incongruity of the images chosen. On the left, James Gandolfini is inhabiting Tony Soprano, the familiar blank stare that could explode into either rage or hilarity boring right through the screen and a hundred yards behind you. On the right of him, two airbrushed cartoon characters ham it up.
The "Bing" and "Bang" images were sourced from some alternate universe where TV is entertainment, while the "Bada" was taken from the universe where TV is Good. They do look goofy together.I’m both a “Sopranos” superfan and a pedant, but I didn’t take offense at the ad. Because I had already become obsessed with several other clumsy HBO Max digital ads. But also reluctantly impressed by them, too. HBO Max, which launches on May 27, has two very good problems. First, it could be argued that it has the best lineup of beloved shows and movie franchises of any streaming service, including “Friends,” “Game of Thrones,” the DC Cinematic Universe, “Looney Tunes,” “South Park” and more. Second, it has all of HBO but way more than just HBO, requiring the awkward dance of squeezing that brand into its name but communicating that the streaming service is in fact not HBO. Or HBO Go. Or HBO Now. (None of which is TV, by the way.)
These good problems led to the tagline, “Where HBO Meets So Much More.” “So much more,” as a copywriter, is what made me reluctant at first to embrace them campaign. Usually it’s too lazy a phrase to even be considered, let alone make it into a tagline of a brand campaign. Then there was the body copy, “Where Lions and Tigers and Bears meet Friends and Heroes and Princes.” And the anthem video copy, “There’s a place where the Witch of the West meets the King in the North, and The Fresh Prince meets The Dark Knight. That place is HBO Max.”I had become fascinated with the goofy, generic writing. Where "this" meets "that," it struck me, is just as flavorless and open-ended as "so much more." But as I used an increasingly larger portion of my 14 hours per pandemic day scrolling through garbage on the Internet last week, I started to understand that the campaign was actually good.
Excess is the single most important feature of a streaming service at the moment. Excess content. Excess familiar IP. So much of both that you can never ever get to the end of it. And everything in the campaign that I and everyone else online snickered at signaled the excess of content and IP that people can get with a subscription to HBO Max. The lockdown in response to the pandemic has had two effects on existing and new streaming services. One is a rise in demand. Netflix added 16 million subscribers in the first quarter of the year, more than double expectations. The other effect has been a disappearance of supply of new content. Production is at zero, until work-from-home and shelter-in-place orders are lifted. That means streaming services with a big back catalogue or a pipeline of content already produced are at a big advantage. We cannot get enough content right now. And with the pipeline of new movies and TV shows most likely drying up soon, we cannot get enough of the content we already know and love. HBO Max, by clumsily cramming those characters together in its campaign, is positioning itself to feed that bottomless appetite for beloved characters at the perfect moment.
The campaign has one message: more. More characters you know. More content you don't have right now. So much more we can't even hold it in this video, this tweet or this billboard. It's endless. It's excess. It's Max. Compare that to the metaphorical, comparatively sophisticated, even subtle Peacock campaign, with more focus on unknown new shows, an evocative rather than literal name and an early teaser phase that only featured real birds. Peacock isn't launching until July, which gives it time to hit a bit harder on existing IP. And It's free. That word will help.
My "Give Quibi A Break" take is brewing (maybe). But I will say, at risk of defending the world's largest telecommunications company, that the HBO Max campaign does deserve a break despite being clumsy. If Quibi learned anything, it's that size matters. Size of catalogue and size of screen and size of stars and size of social media audience for screenshots of your content. Disney + proved it. So don't groan if you see an ad with Jared Leto's Joker sipping an espresso with Paulie Walnuts outside the pork store. Excess is right.
The shorter stuff
Had to use my DVR like it’s 2009 for this. (The Ringer)
Luminary was a mini-Quibi. A bite of a Quibi. A Biquibi? (Bloomberg)
Could’ve used much more shitting on the brunch crowd. (NYTMag)
Only Seinfeld could get away with such an out of touch poster indulging his delusional, off-putting Bond obsession. Because we know he doesn’t give a fuck about us, pandemic or not. (Image)
Insane that a Chris Hemsworth movie with no marketing that no one seems to care about is #1 on Netflix and probably has 30 million viewers already in less than a week. (Image)
“Money Heist” is a name so powerfully dumb that the show is unstoppable. (THR)
This documentary about incels will be trending this week. (Prime Video)
Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” will explode. Will anything else be in theaters? (IndieWire)
Chris Evans is in a super-serious Apple TV+ show right now? (Image)
100% in for David Gordon Green's "Hellraiser" on HBO. (Deadline)
I was wrong about Ryan Murphy’s “The Politician.” It wasn’t a hit. This new one called “Hollywood” looks…very expensive. (YouTube)
Wish I had known the staff of The Daily Mail hung out at SoHo Grand after work all these years. (VF)
The full 90-second music video for 100 gecs’ “Money Machine” went viral on Twitter despite being almost a year old. (Twitter)
Budweiser brought back one of the last funny commercials and made it unfunny. (Twitter)
Like Howard Stern, I will not be trying to get into any “exclusive Zoom party.” (Bloomberg)
The pandemic giveth and the pandemic taketh away. NBA gets a “Parks And Rec” reunion after WanerMedia loses a “Friends” reunion. (CNN)
Now do a story on the Condé Nast CEO’s classic rock cover band called the Merger. (NYT)