Could HBO’s investment in ‘Industry’ help consolidate its success?

It’s a story as old as time in the television industry: there’s no better way to make a TV show a hit than to move it to a time slot that’s conducive to success.

This summer, before the debut of IndustryThe third season of, Warner Bros. Discovery moved the show from its Monday night premiere on HBO to the coveted Sunday night slot, which has hosted hits like House of the Dragon, Succession, And The last of us. Since then, the series has seen a significant increase in its audience: according to Nielsen and WBD, the third episode of the new season attracted 370,000 multiplatform viewers, a record for the series.

The move is one of several small steps WBD is taking to promote the promising series, and it comes as the company seeks to right the wrong path by deprioritizing the HBO brand in its product and remarketing it as a place where viewers can expect to find — and pay for — prestige, premium programming.

Recipe for success

For WBD, which declined to comment for this story, highlighting shows like Industry can do more than just attract viewers: it can signal to audiences the type of high-quality programming for which HBO has historically been known.

“Our priority is to make sure that we are clearly positioned as a premium provider of inventory across that spectrum of different quality types, with HBO content at the top of that spectrum,” CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said on stage last week at the BofA Securities 2024 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in New York.

That’s partly because, he added, that “premium inventory” has allowed the company to “maintain higher prices,” such as charging customers nearly $17 a month for ad-free viewing on Max, more than many similar services on the market.

The renewed interest in HBO content stands in contrast to the company’s more recent moves to deprioritize the HBO brand, including WBD’s rebranding of HBO Max as Max last year, as well as its decision to call upcoming shows based on Warner Bros. IP Max Originals instead of HBO Originals. In June, Casey Bloys, president and CEO of HBO and Max Content, said WBD would reverse course on the latter and begin to differentiate the two brands again.

HBO, which is still available as a cable channel, saw the end of its hit series Succession last year, and House of the Dragon, Another Sunday night staple, which wrapped up a shortened eight-episode second season last month. Positioning Industry On Sundays, it helps fill a programming gap beyond anything else.

But Sunday night has been and continues to be strategically critical to HBO: Last March, an HBO executive told Marketing Brew that “Sunday is a defining part of our brand.”

The Sunday evening slot alone can encourage households to “permanently associate [the] time slot with sit down, open a beer, [and having a] glass of wine [or] “We’ll have a cup of tea and watch their show together,” Tayla-Lee Chick, managing director of creative agency Bald, told Marketing Brew.

Go viral

In addition to giving it a more popular time slot, Industry is getting some promotion on Instagram and HBO’s TikTok account, as well as TV ads. A spot promoting the third season that aired in August on shows like TBS American Lawmen logged nearly 170 million TV impressions last month, according to measurement firm iSpot.

The show’s social footprint is also growing. IndustryThe Instagram account had nearly 23,000 followers by the time Season 2 ended in September 2022, according to an application from ad agency Glow, which worked on the campaign; its follower count has more than doubled since then, hovering around 50,000 today. According to Similarweb, search volume for the phrase “hbo industry” increased by triple digits in August compared to the previous month.

Chick said other choices could help the show attract a younger audience. This season, the show cast millennial favorite Kit Harington Game of Thronesand the plot of Season 3 centers on ethical investing, which Chick says could serve to keep the show relevant to a “younger, beginner, ambitious and motivated” demographic this season.

The concept of the series itself, however, might be its biggest selling point. The series, which has been compared to Successionfollows young professionals dealing with career anxieties, as well as balancing work, personal life and their mental health, which may resonate with viewers going through similar struggles, Chick said.

Succession focused on a certain career stage where one might be “the CEO of this billion dollar industry, while [on Industry]most of the characters are [at their] “This is my first job,” she said. “This generation hasn’t really been targeted by these kinds of shows.”