The streaming wars are fought on all fronts, even in the cable provider call centers. To encourage call center sales reps to recommend HBO Max, we needed to get them excited about what the product offers. To do this, we tapped into the hotly anticipated HBO series House Of The Dragon as our vehicle for an immersive XR experience, available through the dedicated point-of-sale (POS) website. The experience provided useful sales techniques delivered through an entertaining, on-brand methodology, which resulted in an exceptional uptake in subscriptions.

HBO Max is a premium subscription product, offering all of HBO’s original catalog, and a huge library of the latest movies and most beloved classics. We used to say: come for the movies, stay for the series. Now, it’s the original series that commands the most attention, so when a new, tentpole series arrived in the form of a Game Of Thrones prequel, we grabbed it.

Our brief was to educate and entertain the target audience in a way that made them want to recommend the product to their customers. The singular objective was to encourage the recommendation of the product and, ultimately, upsell a paid subscription to the overall cable provider package.

Our creative idea focused on immersing our audience in the thrilling world of House Of The Dragon by recreating an exact replica of an integral set in the series – the Great Hall.

Our objective was to bring them into the series and keep them engaged in the XR Experience.

The audience could visit on a weekly basis to collect dragon eggs, view exclusive content, and enter into a sweepstakes, which incentivized them to keep coming back. By encouraging regular return visits, their connection to the series and product would increase and remain top of mind when discussing options with their customers.

To give the audience a true sense of being “insiders” on such a huge new series, the exclusivity factor was important to establish. By treating this audience to an incredible, immersive environment that only they could access, packed with Easter eggs and prizes, we showed them how important they are to the brand.

Solving the technical challenge was our biggest breakthrough. We were provided 3D Lidar scans of the real House Of The Dragon set to help us accurately design the environment of the XR Experience. The 3D files were MASSIVE in size. We had to figure out how to optimize them to a size suitable for web XR, which was like trying to fit a semi truck through a straw. To make it work, we had to apply innovative retopology techniques from previous AR experiences. The breakthrough moment was bringing down 15,000,000 polygons to 1.5 million.

Game Of Thrones is wildly popular so we decided to put the XR Experience in the world of House of the Dragon, the highly-anticipated Game of Thrones prequel – taking advantage of the excitement surrounding the premiere of the new series. We created an immersive experience that allowed our audience, the sales representatives, to explore an exact replica of the show’s set over a four-week period. In order to make it as real as possible, we used high res, 3D scans of the real set. Then, pushing the limits of web-based XR, we managed to optimize the 3D files down to a suitable size in order to create a rich, immersive experience without needing an extra app or hardware.

The XR Experience was live for four weeks. In that time, the call center reps spent an average of 13 minutes in the experience, with 18% returning each week, resulting in an increase of 41% of hits to the “How to Sell” page. Their increased participation in sales training led to a huge 47% increase in subscription sign-ups and 4.5 times more traffic to the point-of-sale website. These results went far beyond client expectations.

There is massive fandom surrounding the Game Of Thrones franchise, so we knew putting the XR Experience squarely into that fictional world would energize existing fans and also create new fans for the product. Since participation in the XR Experience didn’t require prior familiarity with the IP, it was fully inclusive in terms of engaging our entire target audience.