Despite having made big strides forward in gender equity and acceptance, women still live with the pressure of how a woman traditionally “should” be. Each and every time we see gender performed in a new way on screen, it becomes easier for women to live their truth.

HBO Max is home to a huge variety of female characters—some conventionally feminine, others not so much. These characters have been bolstered, encouraged, strengthened, changed and challenged by the relationships they’ve had with other women on-screen, just as many of us are in our real life relationships.

This year, HBO Max sought to push boundaries and break rules to expand the “acceptable” narrative of who a woman can be. The objective was to demonstrate how meaningful female relationships support and inspire women to grow into their truest selves. To inspire all women to share their innermost, authentic selves with each other and

Issa and Molly on Insecure. Rue and Jules on Euphoria. The women of Sex and the City.

As these on-screen friendships prove, our relationships with the other women in our lives change, challenge and shape us. They help us grow into our most genuine and authentic selves, and give us permission to be who we really are.

So we partnered with the card game We’re Not Really Strangers to create a deck, inspired by HBO female friendships, that could help nurture IRL female friendships. Our game gave women a chance to explore their relationships to one another on an even deeper level with 50 unique questions inspired by HBO BFFs.

In the end, we engaged HBO and WNRS’s fanbases, as well as hundreds of college besties, and even the cast members of the hit show Sex Lives of College Girls – and sold out the game in 13 minutes.

The target HBO Max audience includes women aged 18-34. They tend to skew urban and affluent with a high affinity for entertainment and pop culture. As a culture, we still have a long way to go to shift gender norms. It is a continuous battle that we are all up against.

HBO Max is committed to telling authentic stories that bring new or unexpected dimensions of women’s lives to light. The network is home to some of the most iconic rule-breaking women, who have been strengthened by the intimate female relationships they have on screen.

Following up on past efforts, in 2021 HBO Max launched, “So She Did”: a female-centric brand platform that’s all about highlighting and supporting women, on and off the network. Each time a woman acts in an unconventional way, she’s pushing the narrative forward for all women, setting an example, so that other women can create

The campaign was executed in two phases: tease and launch. To tease the partnership with HBO Max, We’re Not Really Strangers took to Instagram and posted one of their famously cryptic in-feed posts with a twist—it centered around friendship and HBO Max was tagged.

Two days later, the partnership was formally announced on We’re Not Really Strangers’ Instagram feed. A question from the HBO Max card pack was posted and garnered thousands of reactions. And two days after that, Amrit Kaur (star of the hit HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls) went live on her Instagram to play the card game with a friend. So much hype had been built around the launch of the HBO Max card pack that once it was released via a link posted to Instagram, it sold out in thirteen minutes. A digital download was made available to all shortly thereafter.

We saw impressive numbers across all social postings. The We’re Not Really Strangers Instagram in-feed tease post garnered 3.4 million impressions, while the launch post came in at 1.9 million impressions. There were a total of 29.7k visits to the HBO Max-branded landing page on werenotreallystrangers.com (in the four weeks the site was live) and over 19.1k digital downloads were completed.

We’re Not Really Strangers’ highest performing Instagram story surrounding the partnership reached 320.7k users and had a click through rate of 7.8%, above industry standard (1% CTR on Average Meta Ads). It’s then no surprise that our limited edition packs sold out within thirteen minutes of going live - a record for We’re Not Really Strangers.