Facebook Action Will Pick Winner of HBO’s “Pimp Ray” Ad Contest
To promote its new summer Sunday-night program “Hung”—the story of a Detroit high-school teacher who decides to up his income by opening a stud service without the livestock, so to speak—HBO is asking viewers to “Pimp Out Ray and Win $10K”—and then score some click-through action on the Facebook ad network.
Would-be panderers can go to a microsite created by HBO and agency Deep Focus and get started building a cheeky personals ad to help Ray build his business. The steps include creating a title and body copy using less than 100 characters, then matching those to a menu of portraits and body-shot photos provided by HBO.
The ads accepted for the contest are placed into a gallery available for public scrutiny and voting during the submission period, until Aug. 2. After that, judges will select three finalists based on creativity, originality and relevance to the show’s theme, as well as the popular vote.
Those three finalist ads will go into rotation on the Facebook network Aug. 9 to Aug. 16. The winner will be determined by figuring the click-through rate (CTR) for each ad: that is, the number of times viewers clicked on it divided by the number of times the ad was seen.
The grand-prize winner in the contest will receive a check for $10,000, and HBO will receive all rights to use contestants’ ad submissions in their online campaigns.
A contest with this kind of focus and source material obviously needs to skirt the borders of taste while conveying the mature and comic nature of the content, so the “Pimp Ray” microsite is explicit in noting that while the organizers are looking for witty ads, “be advised, funny and clever doesn’t mean offensive!”
That’s all the more crucial since the three finalist ads will have to comply with Facebook’s general advertising guidelines. Those prohibit not only “adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions that are excessively suggestive or sexual” but also any ads referencing “adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis.”
Obviously HBO is exerting control over the imagery by supplying a limited menu of graphic assets (although a few of those might be construed as skirting the borders of the “excessively suggestive”.) In terms of copy, the ads already in the gallery give players a sense of what will be considered acceptable. One ad, next to a male trouser shot, is headlined, “Vacation in the South of Pants!”
