When it comes to cre­at­ing great con­tent that cus­tomers eager­ly con­sume, even some of the biggest names in the busi­ness strug­gle – and some­times fail. In fact, reps for two such brands, the New York Times and HBO, spoke last month at Ad Age’s dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence about the lessons they’ve learned from some of their most dis­tinct fail­ures.

The New York Times

For her part, Mered­ith Kopit Levien, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of adver­tis­ing at the New York Times, point­ed to the Oscar-win­ning movie “12 Years a Slave”, which was based on the mem­oir by Solomon Northup.

“161 years ago, the New York Times wrote a sto­ry about Northup and one of the many won­ders of work­ing at a ven­er­a­ble insti­tu­tion like the New York Times is that we found the sto­ry and prepped it for its social media debut,” Levien said.

After tweet­ing out a link to the 161-year-old sto­ry, Levien said the brand “sat back and pre­pared our­selves to har­vest a flood of traf­fic.”

But that’s not what hap­pened. Instead, Gawk­er cre­at­ed its own post based on the Times sto­ry and, dis­ap­point­ing­ly for the Times at least, “what for us was a mod­est suc­cess­ful social media moment turned in to a huge mon­e­ti­z­able hit for Gawk­er.”

The same was true for the Times’ video about pho­tog­ra­ph­er Wal­ter Chan­do­ha, Lessons from a Mas­ter Cat Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, which gar­nered a mod­est 7,400 views.

“How can we be the only place on earth that doesn’t make a cat video go viral?” Levien said.

In the midst of these dis­ap­point­ments came the unex­pect­ed release of the inter­nal Times report about its dig­i­tal strug­gles, which was leaked to Buz­zFeed, which then cre­at­ed a post that even­tu­al­ly gar­nered near­ly 500,000 views.

“We are win­ning at jour­nal­ism, but los­ing at find­ing the widest audi­ence for it,” Levien said. But, since that report was pub­lished, Levien said the Times has made some impor­tant changes to its dig­i­tal con­tent efforts.

Name­ly, the brand has “[defied] the grav­i­ty of tradition…We have embraced the notion that it’s not enough just to find the best sto­ries, but to also find the right audi­ence for those sto­ries and the job doesn’t end at just get­ting the sto­ry,” she said.

In part to illus­trate the increas­ing impor­tance of oth­er plat­forms, the Times’ dai­ly meet­ing to pitch what should be on the front page of the news­pa­per is no longer called Page One, she said.

The brand has also invent­ed what Levien calls “new ways to cre­ate val­ue.”

In oth­er words, the Times has moved into the brand­ed con­tent space with more than 50 pieces of so-called brand sto­ry­telling to date, Levien said.

“Whether it’s a sto­ry from a mar­keter or the news­room, it’s the kind of work that makes them feel things, stop and share that find the widest audi­ence,” she said.

But, at the same time, Levien said the Times has­n’t lost sight of what got it to this point in the first place.

“Qual­i­ty sto­ry­telling is what got us here,” Levien said.

To illus­trate this, she point­ed to a scoop reporter Nico­la Clark got about the delib­er­ate crash of the Ger­man­wings flight in March, which enabled the New York Times to “dom­i­nate” world­wide cov­er­age for two and a half days.

HBO

After a 2012 Nielsen study found most con­sumers were using devices while watch­ing TV, Sab­ri­na Calu­o­ri, vice pres­i­dent of dig­i­tal and social media at HBO, said she was sud­den­ly get­ting pres­sure from above about what it meant for HBO and how the brand could con­tin­ue to dri­ve engage­ment.

HBO launched its social TV plat­form HBO Con­nect in 2011, which, she said, was a “huge suc­cess” in the tra­di­tion­al sense that it gen­er­at­ed head­lines.

With HBO Con­nect, the brand “cre­at­ed a site where we aggre­gat­ed the con­ver­sa­tion around shows and brand­ed it, which was the first time a net­work had done that,” she said. “We were not going to let Vig­gle and Get­Glue be the only des­ti­na­tion for fans. We should be able to curate the expe­ri­ence for our fans.”

How­ev­er, Calu­o­ri said, even though HBO Con­nect was “well-received by the ad community…the dirty secret is that it did not deliv­er on the engage­ment we had hoped.”

So the brand went back and did a lot of research to fig­ure out what exact­ly sec­ond screens meant for HBO and, in 2013, the team began work­ing on a “Game of Thrones” sec­ond-screen expe­ri­ence for Xbox.

“There are so many peo­ple, places and chal­lenges to keep track of [in ‘Game of Thrones’], so we cre­at­ed a rich, robust sec­ond-screen expe­ri­ence and you could get all this ancil­lary con­tent to fig­ure out what’s going on,” Calu­o­ri said.

But even though it was a “beau­ti­ful expe­ri­ence” that was “well-received,” it was not that heav­i­ly used, so Calu­o­ri said HBO once again went back to its research to fig­ure out what was going on.

That’s when HBO had some­thing of an “aha!” moment, she said.

“Con­sumers were actu­al­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the first screen, so why are we try­ing to dis­tract you? That was a key moment for us,” Calu­o­ri said. “They don’t want to be dis­tract­ed from the show. If you’re watch­ing ‘Game of Thrones’ and you look down, you might miss your favorite char­ac­ter get­ting killed, which made us rethink the sec­ond screen.”

In oth­er words, while con­sumers want to talk about and engage with HBO’s con­tent, they don’t want to do so dur­ing the actu­al pro­gram­ming.

As a result, Calu­o­ri said HBO has since shift­ed its efforts to cre­ate more of a “ful­ly respon­sive web expe­ri­ence” that is more like a “com­pan­ion experience…meant to be con­sumed after or before view­ing, which was a huge shift for us.” The Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Chan­nel has done sim­i­lar, most recent­ly with its immer­sive “Killing Jesus” web­site.

Final­ly, the brand saw the engage­ment it was look­ing for – to the tune of 1 mil­lion uniques per week.

“[Con­sumers] kept com­ing back because they need to under­stand new char­ac­ters and it became a com­pan­ion piece to the show,” Calu­o­ri said.

As a result, HBO will be launch­ing a new ver­sion of HBO Con­nect this sum­mer and “repo­si­tion­ing it to be where the most engaged con­sumers can come back for exclu­sive expe­ri­ences on an ongo­ing basis,” Calu­o­ri added.