We Spent a Day Watching HBO Max With Ads—and Here’s What We Found

When HBO Max executives said that the service’s ad-supported tier HBO Max With Ads—which debuted Wednesday—was going to include the lightest ad load in streaming video, they really weren’t kidding. Subscribers watching HBO Max original series like The Flight Attendant on Wednesday evening only saw about 18 seconds of advertising space over the course of one 41-minute episode, thanks to the company’s “brand block” ad format in which Volkswagen granted an ad-free viewing experience, aside from a six-second message during three blink-and-you-missed-them ad pods. The ultra ad-light experience is central to HBO Max With Ads’ aim to build out a streaming video product that can deliver for advertisers while also not annoying or frustrating consumers with an unwieldy or overly invasive advertising experience. In its first 24 hours on the market, HBO Max is offering up even fewer ads than promised—WarnerMedia ad sales chief JP Colaco told Adweek last month that the streamer would feature no more than four minutes of ads per hour—while teeing up a variety of advertising creative and starting to build out personalized ad serving that will keep consumers from becoming bored or irritated during ad breaks. “Our very simple north star was to build the most delightful ad-supported viewing experience we could for our customers, while making this the best place for brands to reach them,” said Julian Franco, WarnerMedia vp of product, who is leading development of HBO Max With Ads and working with Colaco on the roll-out. Adweek spent about a day exploring HBO Max’s ad-supported tier, testing out the advertising experience and seeing how HBO Max With Ads stacks up against the year-old original HBO Max. HBO Max, mostly HBO Max’s ad-supported tier (which costs $9.99 per month) shares many of the same features of HBO Max’s ad-free tier ($14.99 per month), even though some content, like Warner Bros. day-and-date film releases (including The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which debuts Friday), and features, like the ability to download programs to a device or watch some films in 4K, are not available on HBO Max With Ads. The interface is also largely similar: the exploration experience is virtually indistinguishable from HBO Max’s ad-free tier, save for some promotions for new theatrical releases that only appear for subscribers who pay the extra $5 for access to them. The goal of the interface is designed to reduce friction for consumers looking to find new programming to watch, a virtuous cycle that will hopefully lead both to better consumer engagement and better advertising results. “We care as much about the consumer experience as we do about the brand impact,” Colaco said. Within the interface itself, there’s no focus on upselling ad-supported viewers to pay more for an ad-free experience within the interface, or pushing existing HBO Max subscribers to opt for an ad-supported experience instead. Outside the interface, WarnerMedia also does not plan to market the services in a way that suggests that HBO Max With Ads is in any way inferior to original HBO Max—an intentional choice aimed at respecting consumers no matter what option they choose. “We never talk about it like an upgrade or a downgrade,” Franco said. “We just want to present the choices very clearly, allow each customer to make the decision about what’s best for them or for their households or their families, and then respect them there and give them the very best experience that we can.” An ultra-light ad load The more than 35 advertisers who have signed on run the gamut across categories, offering up a wide variety of creative and brand mix throughout the viewing experience. Over the course of 24 hours, an ad-supported viewer watching programming throughout the day and evening saw ads for nearly two dozen brands, including Ace Hardware, Adobe, Aflac, Airbnb, AT&T, Dairy Queen, Epix, Glade, Geico, Hotwire.com, Macy’s, The New York Times, Pizza Hut, USAA, Vizzy Hard Seltzer, Volkswagen, two pharmaceuticals and one drug company. Some advertisers choose to run ads only during certain times on the platform, like Bacardi, which focused its ad spend in the evenings. A maximum of two brands appeared in each ad pod, which generally consisted of one 30-second spot and one 15-second spot, but varied depending on the show and advertisers. HBO Max With Ads’ frequency cap limits the repetition of the same creative to three times per day, which encourages brands to serve up various pieces of creative to keep things interesting, Colaco said. (At the outset, the service had 72 pieces of creative it could rotate through.) The company settled on no more than four minutes of ads per hour—a minute less than the ad loads on both Discovery+ and Peacock, which were previously the lightest among streamers—but at the outset, the ad experience clocked in at even less on show originals, translating to a minute or less of advertising per break. Those breaks themselves were also as sparse as they were short. HBO Max’s Friends reunion special, which is 1 hour and 43 minutes, had just six ad breaks plus a 15-second pre-roll ad, and only about 3 minutes and 30 seconds of ads per hour—all designed to make the advertising as minimally invasive as possible and quickly get viewers back into the special. “It's about creating harmony between the amount of content you consume and the amount of advertising you watch,” Colaco said. “People in general are not against watching ads—they're against watching too many ads or watching ads that aren't relevant to them. Those are two things that we're trying to optimize for in this experience.” Intuitive ad breaks In Max Originals and movies, ad breaks are built in manually in every ad-supported program so as not to disrupt story flow or important scenes, a major change from many AVOD services where ads are inserted programmatically at seemingly random timestamps. “The way that we did that was having a team of people make subjective but objective decisions about where an ad break should go in regard to story,” Franco explained. “How do you best receive Act One? How do we best get you into that story? When do we have the best opportunity to deliver the right ad breaks and the right ad load within that film [or show] to make sure you ultimately complete it?” It's an intentional choice designed to keep viewers plugged into the programming and prevent an ad from feeling so disruptive that it turns a viewer off. That’s key to HBO Max’s broad goal of keeping consumers coming back to watch more programming for longer—all of which ladders into better results for advertisers. “JP and I both have some experience with how quickly a bad advertising experience can deteriorate a viewing experience for a customer,” Franco said. “Our goal is ultimately to have you watch HBO Max originals and ideally not really notice the ads but notice the advertisers that bring you that delightful experience, and then finish the season. And then when we bring out more seasons, have you finish the series.” … But you never know what ad experience you’ll get There’s one major exception to the advertising optimization happening throughout the rest of HBO Max: HBO content, which runs without any ads at all. While the arrangement is designed to extend the premium HBO experience from linear, which has always run advertising-free (hence the famous slogan, "It's not TV. It's HBO."), the result on HBO Max With Ads can mean a somewhat inconsistent advertising experience for viewers if they do not pay attention to what is an HBO original series and what is a Max original series. The Flight Attendant? Be ready for a few ads. The Kate Winslet limited series Mare of Easttown? No ads at all. (And for fans of only HBO programming looking for a cheaper option to watch those shows, HBO Max With Ads is effectively a discounted ad-free subscription.) Ditto for HBO Movie Presentations, in which films like Tenet and Birds of Prey run ad-free due to the distribution arrangements that brought those films to the streamer as part of a broader deal with HBO to also air them on linear. For consumers who don’t follow the distribution bread trail, it’s a somewhat incongruous distinction—turn on 2001: A Space Odyssey and you’ll get eight short ad breaks, but watch the Max original film Locked Down and it’ll be entirely ad-free, even though it's not an HBO original. WarnerMedia’s JP Colaco on Selling HBO Max With Ads and His First Upfront at the Company That major exclusion in terms of programming may be why ad breaks like brand blocks have so far been an attractive option for some advertisers like Volkswagen, who has so far opted to run those blocks during evening hours, when viewers may be pressed for time before heading to bed and are more likely to favorably respond to an ad-free experience. “We’re trying to tell stories that move people, and for brands to tell a story within that content story allows them to own the entire experience, while creating this gratification from the user, because you’re actually bringing them this wonderful story,” Colaco said of the format. “We will see really incredible brand metrics for the brand block.” There’s no timeline yet on when additional features will roll out on HBO Max With Ads, but other tools in the works for the coming months include non-interruptive pause ads, which are designed to keep the advertising minimally invasive and keep consumers coming back. How many people do executives think will opt for HBO Max With Ads over its pricier ad-free tier? Franco and Colaco won’t say—but instead insist that the breakdown doesn’t really matter, so long as consumers are happy with the choices they have. “What we've tried to do is make sure that we're ultimately agnostic about where the customer chooses to meet us,” Franco said.