Challenge

Starz Entertainment, a division of Liberty Media Corporation, provides premium at-home entertainment. Launched in 1994, Starz Entertainment operates 16 movie channels under the Starz® and Encore® brands with a combined subscriber base of approximately 49.4 million. Although the bulk of Starz programming is feature films on several themed channels, they also offer original programming.

Launched in October of 2008, the Starz original drama Crash is an adaptation of the 2004 Academy Award winning film of the same name. To prepare for the show’s debut, Starz Entertainment worked with their search engine marketing (SEM) agency to develop a paid search campaign. The goals of the campaign were two-fold; to increase interest and quality traffic to the Starz Crash home page, as well as generate subscriptions for Starz services.

The challenge of this campaign was in screening out non-relevant search terms inherent to such a general title of the show, including differentiating the show from the film, which shares the same name and premise. However, due to the promotional nature of this campaign, the search terms had to remain broad enough to draw attention (and paid subscriptions) to the Starz site.