HBO Asia saw the launch of His Dark Materials, a fantasy title based on Philip Pullman’s award winning & beloved series, as a potential hit that could reach the level of fan love as Game of Thrones. They wanted to leverage the opportunity to grow their social following by attracting both new viewers and long-time fans of the books.

Tommy was asked to conceive pre-launch, launch and post-launch social concepts that would unite existing fans of the book trilogy and reel in new audiences with the show’s mythical and emotional themes.

Our main objective was to bring His Dark Materials to life in a way that excites and engages new and existing fans alike, and strengthen HBO Asia’s social and brand presence in APAC.

Our creative challenge was to introduce His Dark Materials in-world themes to HBO Asia’s followers, who may be unfamiliar with the story and characters.

We decided to immerse the audience in the magic of His Dark Materials and generate social conversation by creating an interactive Twitter activation where fans could tweet HBO Asia to discover their personalised daemon.

On launch day, we prompted fans to send @HBOAsia their 3 favourite emojis. We rewarded responses with a customised still that showed fans what form their daemon would take, which they could retweet or react to.

Our target audience was chiefly split into two segments - existing His Dark Materials fans and HBO Asia fans unfamiliar with the franchise.

Unlike followers of His Dark Materials’ owned channels, @HBOAsia’s followers would likely have no context of the story and would require a more impactful introduction to Philip Pullman’s universe.

At the same time, we wanted to give existing His Dark Materials fans a reason to follow and recognise @HBOAsia as the home for all things His Dark Materials in the region.

With this in mind, we created the #WhatsYourDaemon Twitter activation as an engaging way for newcomers to His Dark Materials to dip their toes into the universe, while driving existing fans to champion their fandom. Twitter provided the ideal platform to evoke mystery and surprise around the title, while prompting both target audiences to mutually interact with @HBOAsia and spark conversation around in the show.

From project kick-off, we worked under a 3-week timeline to produce the initial CTA video and customisable #WhatsYourDaemon template, flesh out a creative playbook with guidelines and watch-outs for live responses, and compile an image library of animals categorised by types of emoji.

During the activation’s launch, our assembled team of designers and copywriters spent 12 hours matching fan submissions to daemons and crafting responses on the fly. To generate extra reach and attention, we also tweeted call-outs to His Dark Materials talents such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, surprising them with their own daemons.

By the end of the live activation, we created 135 unique pieces of content.

The #WhatsYourDaemon Twitter activation amassed over 2M in audiences reached, with the CTA video alone receiving more than 638K views and capturing 165 new followers. The entire campaign’s content earned over 72K engagements.

Our marathon of tweets also earned the attention of His Dark Materials star Lin-Manuel Miranda, who responded to his surprise daemon, as well as participation from Singaporean media publishers SGAG and Geek Culture.