HBO MAX x A24: THE SYMPATHIZER

AGENCY

Team Epiphany - 2024

SKILLS

Strategy, influencer marketing, content ideation.

SUMMARY

When A24 and HBO MAX tapped us to do the influencer marketing for their adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, it felt like an unusually personal project. My mother and father are both Vietnamese refugees who immigrated to America during the Fall of Saigon so I had plenty of lived experience which imbued the campaign.

The novel’s central theme is duality: the duality of the conflicted main character, the duality of immigrant identity, the duality between truth and media lies, the duality within all of us as we sympathize with many sides of a war.

To thematically extend this core idea, I developed a content concept in which Vietnamese influencers answer a prompt that explored a duality of competing values within their own lives. These personal stories were then voiced over slice-of-life clips which are paired with animated videos by a Vietnamese illustrator. The result is a format that becomes a duality in-of-itself - all while placing Vietnamese storytelling front and center like the show.

We selected influencers from a wide range of verticals from cooking to lifestyle to entertainment in order to maximize reach and create a diverse selection of perspectives.

The campaign won a bronze and silver honor for TikTok and Instagram respectively at the 9th annual Short Impact Awards.