How the most cutting-edge network on television use smart direct marketing to win over viewers

By: Anne Stuart

If you plan to sell a TV show about polygamy, it helps if you have a sense of whimsy. That’s just what HBO employed to promote its recent “Big Love” series.

“We developed ideas to subvert some of the common conventions of marriage in a very lighthearted way,” says Zach Enterlin, vice president of advertising and promotion for the premium cable channel. “We wanted to take the traditional relationship of one plus one and make it one plus one … plus two.”

That coupling of expected and unexpected — which Enterlin calls “fairly representative” of HBO’s overarching philosophy for marketing its collection of groundbreaking shows — makes perfect sense for “Big Love,” a fictional drama about a contemporary Utah family secretly living in polygamy. The story revolves around retail executive Bill Henrickson, his first — and legal — wife, Barbara, and his second and third wives through “plural marriage,” Nicolette and Margene.

To promote the series’ premiere in March 2006, HBO mailed formal “wedding invitations” to 100,000 prospects, mostly women. In elegant script, the invitations requested “the honor of your presence at the marriage of Barbara Dutton & Nicolette Grant & Margene Heffman to Bill Henrickson.”

That introduction undoubtedly prompted more than a few double takes, but the following lines quickly clarified the real message: “[on] Sunday, the twelfth of March at ten o’clock in the evening (nine o’clock in the central time zone), only on HBO.” An insert — the type usually used as a wedding reply card — encouraged recipients to visit a special “Big Love” wedding microsite “to learn more about the happy couples” and enter a contest to win a Hawaiian honeymoon.

The high-quality pieces, mailed in matching envelopes addressed in calligraphy, looked like the real thing. That was no accident: “Authenticity was critical,” Enterlin says. “We heard a lot of anecdotes about how people were fooled for a minute.”

HBO built its mostly female “guest list” with names acquired through partnerships with popular consumer magazines and several wedding Web sites. Enterlin believes the invitations created a sense of strong community. “People who got one felt like they were in exclusive company,” he says.

While there’s no way to tell exactly how many recipients became “Big Love” loyalists, the invitations generated plenty of awareness about the series. “They became a phenomenon. They triggered a lot of chatter online and in blogs,” Enterlin says. HBO also credits the three-week promotion with prompting at least 28,000 visitors to tour the microsite and 8,000 to enter the contest for the Hawaiian dream trip. He adds: “We consider it a great success when nearly 30 percent of the people we targeted with our direct marketing take the next step and log on to find out more about the program.”