To drive awareness around the new documentary Welcome to Chechnya, HBO partnered with Conde Nast’s them. publication to shine light on the atrocities of Chechnya’s gay purge as well as other hate crimes happening against the LGBTQ+ community around the world.
We launched an interactive branded article that ran on Conde Nast’s them. digital publication. The article centered around the unjust civil situation the LGBTQ+ community is currently facing in Chechnya, in an effort to drive dialogue and change. The article also highlighted a number of locations currently fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, like Tanzania, Egypt, Dubai, and Jordan.
The article balanced driving awareness around the documentary and educating audiences around the current situations around the world. Throughout the article, we incorporated hyperlinks to content that allowed readers to better understand the context of the situation and get involved.
After its one week run (from 6/23-6/30), the article delivered 1,505,905 impressions and generated a click-through-rate of 0.51% (significantly greater than them.’s CTR benchmark of 0.21%). Attached please view the reporting with added benchmarks. The them. takeovers delivered 7x the originally forecasted impression goal with over 350K impressions. The Engagement Rate for our dark social posts driving to the custom content was 14.4% compared to the 7% ER benchmark.