The main goal of HBO’s Asian Pacific American Visionaries campaign was to continue developing the platform’s audience of Asian Pacific American storytellers and driving awareness and engagement of the annual Visionaries Short Film Competition. We wanted to enhance perception of the Visionaries Short Film Competition as a premiere program for filmmakers, and create touchpoints with subgroups that may be underrepresented in previous targeting such as Southeast Asians, South Asians, Pacific Islanders, millennials, and Gen Z. We also wanted to fortify an alumni/community network of our winning Visionaries and provide them industry visibility and opportunities.
By leveraging previous winners, network talent and influencers in the space, the event series would look to create authentic and meaningful connections within the Asian Pacific American film community - positively impacting the next generation of filmmakers and supporting more representation throughout the industry.
HBO continually makes milestones in promoting greater diversity in the entertainment industry, both in front of and behind the camera. One such effort in this initiative is the Asian Pacific American Visionaries Short Film Competition, which seeks to identify, highlight, and support emerging APA filmmakers. The campaign put the spotlight on past, present and future APA filmmakers, thus building support around furthering representation. HBO continued to build upon the platform created to build an audience and provide a voice for filmmakers in the APA community.
A challenge was creating COVID compliant moments in LA and NYC. To accomplish our objectives, we found locations with outdoor space and open airflow and under the guidance of the company’s COVID task force, put COVID rules in place for indoor moments.
In celebration of HBO’s annual APA Visionaries short-film competition, HBO’s Multicultural Marketing created a multi-city event series that celebrated the finalists and overarching Asian American Pacific Islander community. The multi-tactic campaign would need to speak directly to target audiences and encourage Asian Pacific American filmmakers to tell their stories and submit to the competition.
First, HBO hosted the official afterparty following the premiere screenings of the winning short-films at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival hosted by our partner, Visual Communications. Building off the momentum of the LA event, HBO followed up with a celebratory screening event in New York City for the very first time.
In September, HBO kicked off the APAV event series at renowned LA restaurant majordomo by chef David Chang. The memorable evening was filled with delicious Asian food, drinks, and music and attended by notable celebrity guests and influencers, HBO executives, and emerging filmmakers and creatives in the local AAPI community.
Upon entry to the event, the guests’ attention was immediately grabbed by a cinematic display of the winning films’ posters along with DJ Amrit providing the live soundtrack. Korean-American pop-star Eric Nam provided a special performance that captivated the audience as guests took to the dance floor to enjoy an epic night!
Following the LA-Based event, HBO continued the event series in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where we transformed a rooftop space into a night market experience inspired by different countries in Asia. After the screening of the winning short films, guests enjoyed food from four different local AAPI-owned restaurants and snatched up various curated snacks and beverages from the Visionary Market.
The evening’s celebrations closed out with Queens-based rapper/singer Anik Khan, who got the crowd moving and warmed up before the headline performance of Korean-American artist Audrey Nuna, as creatives, influencers, and filmmakers gathered under the backdrop of the NYC skyline.
In total, over 450 guests attended the Los Angeles and NYC Asian Pacific American Visionaries events. With over 23 different Asian or AAPI-owned brands present at the event, the series attracted notable guests like Eric Nam, Jamie Chung, Daniel Dae Kim, Jimmy O. Yang, Steph Shepard Suganami, Dante Basco, AJ Rafael, Dumbfoundead, Andrew Fung, David Fung, Charlotte Cho, Andy To, Leo Chan and more. The events garnered over 440+ organic social media posts that resulted in 19MM social media impressions, 2.9+ billion press impressions and 325K social engagements to date!
