How we Helped HBO Connect Viewers to the Real Life Characters

The Pacific is an American war drama miniseries produced by HBO, Playtone, and DreamWorks.

The series is a companion piece to the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers and focuses on the United States Marine Corps's actions in the Pacific Theater of Operations within the wider Pacific War. Whereas Band of Brothers followed the men of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment through the European Theater, The Pacific centers on the experiences of three Marines (Robert Leckie, Eugene Sledge, and John Basilone) who were in different regiments (1st, 5th, and 7th, respectively) of the 1st Marine Division.

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Show runners wanted the audience to feel a connection to their ancestors - the characters on the show. We worked with Ancestry.com to connect viewers of the show to the real-life characters in the show.

• We worked directly with producers to set the tone and manner of the creative to match the show
• Our team carefully built website pages that we treated as if they were memorials to the real people
• We worked with the technical team at Ancestry to create a custom API to enable searches

Hundreds of thousands of viewers connected to the site and looked up their family connections to the characters on the show.

• Site visitors poured over hundreds of pages of information on the real-life soldiers, sailors and airmen in the show
• Thousands discovered their personal connection to this important piece of history
• We aren't quite sure if it ultimately drove an increase in HBO subscribers, but that was never the goal. The goal was to educate the public about this very important part of the war.