Could HBO’s ‘Industry’ investment help solidify it as a hit?

It’s a tale as old as time in the television industry: There’s no better way to make a TV show a success than to move it into a hit-making time slot.

This summer, ahead of the debut of Industry’s third season, Warner Bros. Discovery moved the show from its Monday night premiere time on HBO to the network’s coveted Sunday night slot, which has been home to hits like House of the Dragon, Succession, and The Last of Us. Since then, the show has seen a spike in viewership: According to Nielsen and WBD, the third episode of the new season attracted 370,000 cross-platform viewers, a record for the series.

The move is one of many small steps that WBD has taken to promote the promising series, and it comes as the company is looking to course-correct on a de-prioritization of the HBO brand in its product and once again market it as a place where viewers can expect to find—and pay for—prestige, premium programming.

Recipe for success

For WBD, which declined to comment for this story, elevating shows like Industry can do more than just attract viewers: it can signal to audiences the kind of high-quality shows that HBO has historically been known for.

“Our priority is to make sure that we’re absolutely clearly positioned as a premium provider of inventory in that range of different types of quality, with HBO content at the top of that range,” CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said onstage last week at the BofA Securities 2024 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in New York.

That’s in part, he added, because that “top-of-the-shelf premium inventory” has enabled the company to “maintain pricing premiums,” like charging customers nearly $17 a month for ad-free viewing on Max, higher than many similar services on the market.

The renewed focus on HBO content comes as something of a contrast from more recent company decisions to de-prioritize the HBO brand, including when WBD somewhat infamously rebranded HBO Max to Max last year, as well as a decision to brand forthcoming Warner Bros. IP-based programs as Max Originals instead of HBO Originals. In June, Casey Bloys, HBO and Max Content chairman and CEO, said in June that WBD would reverse course on the latter and begin differentiating between the two brands again.

HBO, which is still available as a cable channel, saw the end of its juggernaut series Succession last year, and House of the Dragon, another Sunday night staple, ended a shortened, eight-episode second season last month. Positioning Industry on Sundays, then, helps fill a programming gap beyond anything else.

But Sunday night has been and continues to be strategically essential for HBO: Last March, an HBO exec told Marketing Brew that “Sundays are a defining element of our brand.”

The Sunday night slot alone may encourage households to “continuously associate [the] time slot with sitting down, cracking open a beer, [and having a] glass of wine [or] a cup of tea, and watching their show together,” Tayla-Lee Chick, managing director at creative agency Bald, told Marketing Brew.

Go viral

In addition to giving it a more popular time slot, Industry is getting some promotion on Instagram and on HBO’s TikTok account, as well as on TV ads. One spot promoting the third season that ran in August on shows like TBS’s American Lawmen clocked almost 170 million TV impressions last month, according to the measurement firm iSpot.

The show’s social footprint is also growing. Industry’s Instagram account had nearly 23k followers around the time that Season 2 ended in September 2022, according to an award submission from the ad agency Glow, which worked on the campaign; its follower count has more than doubled since then, hovering at around 50k today. According to Similarweb, the volume of searches for the phrase “industry hbo” rose by triple digits in August compared to the month prior.

Chick said other choices may help the show appeal to a younger demographic. This season, the show cast Kit Harington of millennial favorite Game of Thrones, and the plot of Season 3 centers on ethical investing, which Chick said could serve to keep the show relevant for a “younger, kind of entry-level, ambitious, driven” demographic this season.

The concept of the show itself, though, could be its biggest selling point. The series, which has been compared to Succession, follows young professionals dealing with career anxieties, as well as balancing work, personal lives, and their mental health, which may resonate with viewers going through similar struggles, Chick said.

Succession focused on a certain career stage where one might be “the CEO of this billion-dollar industry, whereas [on Industry], most of the characters are [at their] first job,” she said. “That generation hasn’t really been targeted in these kinds of shows.”