Case Study
How Phiture Helped HBO Max EMEA Automate Personalized Movie Night Recommendations with Braze
20+
hours saved per month
15+
CRM Ops hours saved per month
+40%
push notification open rate
+20%
content watched from push notifications
Every week, the HBO Max EMEA CRM team sent subscribers a “Movie Night” push notification, a simple but effective ritual that kept audiences engaged. To take it further, they partnered with Phiture to automate and personalize the experience at scale. By connecting HBO Max’s own recommendation engine with Braze, the two teams transformed the workflow into a high-performing, always-on system, driving 40% higher push open rates, 20% more content watched, and 35+ hours saved every month.
The Challenge
The HBO Max EMEA CRM team had a well-loved weekly ritual: every week, they sent subscribers a Movie Night push notification recommending something to watch. The idea was simple and effective, but the execution was anything but.
Every week, the process started from scratch. The team handpicked content manually, wrote bespoke copy and briefed creatives for each send, and rebuilt the campaign setup in Braze from the ground up. The result was a workflow that was resource-heavy, one-size-fits-all in its recommendations, and low on operational efficiency, leaving little room to scale, personalize, or improve over time. Together with Phiture, the team set out to find a smarter way. The goal: deliver personalized, highly relevant movie recommendations to subscribers every week, while dramatically reducing the manual effort required to make it happen.
The Solution
Planning: Understanding the Requirements
Before building anything, the Phiture team worked with HBO Max to define exactly what the solution needed to do. Four requirements shaped the approach: full process automation, flexibility to switch between algorithmic and curated recommendations, title suppression to avoid repeating last week’s pick, and copy rotation to keep messaging fresh across sends.
The key insight was that HBO Max already had an untapped asset, the “For You” editorial tray, an algorithmically generated recommendation feed based on each user’s viewing activity. This had never been connected to the CRM channel. Together, the teams identified the opportunity immediately.
Execution: Building the Automation in Braze
Working closely with the HBO Max CRM team, Phiture designed and built two Braze canvases to cover every scenario.
The Movie Night Automation Canvas ran every week by default, fully automated. It called HBO Max’s “Recommended For You” API endpoint to pull a personalized movie recommendation for each user, filtered results to movies only, and suppressed titles the user had already seen, was currently watching, or had saved to their list. A webhook captured each week’s recommended title and stored it as a custom user attribute, ensuring it would be excluded the following week.
The Movie Night Curated Canvas gave the team an escape hatch for weeks when they wanted to spotlight a specific title editorially. It used a templated setup that required only an asset ID to activate, and the Automation Canvas was built to detect and automatically abort in those weeks.
Copy was handled through a cloud-based connected library of localized headlines across 11 EMEA markets. Using Braze’s Liquid logic and a modulo operator, the system dynamically selected a random headline variant for each send, keeping the messaging feeling fresh without any manual intervention. The copy library could be updated and expanded at any time by the team, keeping editorial control where it belonged.
The result was a single, always-on workflow that connected HBO Max’s recommendation engine, Braze, and a lightweight copy system, running automatically every week without anyone needing to touch it.
The Results
The impact was immediate across both efficiency and engagement.
On the operational side, the automation saved the CRM Ops team more than 20 hours per month and freed up over 15 hours of Briefing and Creative time, resources that could be redirected to higher-value work.
On the performance side, personalization proved its worth. Push notification open rates increased by 40% compared to the pre-automation baseline. Content watched from push notifications rose by 20%. Both figures were measured across an eight-week pre- and post-automation comparison period.
What made the results particularly significant was that the engagement lift came not from more effort, but from less, a smarter system doing the work that had previously been done manually, and doing it at a per-user level that no manual process could match.
Client: HBO Max EMEA
Website: www.hbomax.com
Services: Retention & CRM
HBO Max is a premium streaming platform operated by Warner Bros. Discovery, offering a vast library of films, series, and Max Originals across EMEA and beyond. This engagement was led by Inês Pais, Senior Growth Consultant at Phiture, presented at Braze Forge 2023.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Braze Connected Content, and how was it used here? Braze Connected Content is a feature that allows campaigns to pull in real-time data from external APIs at the moment of send. In this project, Phiture used it to call HBO Max’s “For You” recommendation endpoint and dynamically populate each push notification with a personalised movie title, image, and deep link, unique to every subscriber.
Can this kind of automation work for other streaming or subscription apps? Yes. The architecture Phiture built, connecting a recommendation API, suppression logic, copy rotation, and a curated fallback, is adaptable to any subscription app that has user-level content or product recommendations. It is particularly effective for entertainment, e-commerce, and news apps where content freshness and personalisation directly impact engagement. The key prerequisite, however, is having the right CRM setup in place – one where user-level, and ideally business-level, data is structured and accessible. The sophistication of the output will always reflect the quality of the data infrastructure behind it.
How long does it take to build a CRM automation like this? It depends on the complexity of the data sources and the number of markets involved. For this project, Phiture worked across 11 EMEA markets with multiple API integrations and localisation logic. Typically, a well-scoped automation of this kind can be designed and deployed within a few weeks when the required API endpoints and Braze access are in place.
What results can we expect from personalised push notifications? Results vary by app and audience, but personalisation consistently outperforms broadcast messaging. In this case, HBO Max saw a 40% increase in push open rates and a 20% increase in content watched from push notifications after switching from manually curated to algorithmically personalised recommendations.
Does Phiture only work with Braze? Phiture works across the major CRM and lifecycle marketing platforms, including Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, CleverTap, and others. Braze is a core area of expertise given its flexibility for mobile-first personalisation, but the team adapts to whichever platform the client uses.