Case Study: HBO Max + Mariana Santiago

Challenge

With more than 20 million subscribers and a content library spanning hundreds of genres, HBO Max faces a significant challenge: delivering timely, personalized communications at scale. The award-winning CRM marketing team manages thousands of campaigns annually, often on tight deadlines driven by breaking news and pop culture moments. To meet this demand, HBO Max needed an experienced CRM contractor who could step in quickly, manage executional load, and maintain the brand’s high standard of quality and precision.

Solution

From October 2024 to July 2025, I served as a full-time embedded contractor within HBO Max’s CRM marketing team, contributing across strategy, execution, and quality assurance to help the team scale effectively.

• Campaign Development: Built and deployed emails, push notifications, and member feed messages within Braze, leveraging both Campaigns and Canvases to support rapid, personalized communication. This increased the team’s overall output capacity, ensuring HBO Max could act fast on trending moments.

• Audience Segmentation: Created complex Braze segments based on subscriber behaviors and marketing objectives. These segments powered personalized, behavior-triggered automations, improving message relevance and engagement.

• Quality Assurance: Conducted end-to-end QA reviews across campaigns to ensure flawless execution—verifying design integrity, link accuracy, and audience targeting—prior to deployment.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered closely with marketing, creative, and legal teams to align on messaging, creative assets, and compliance standards, ensuring every campaign launched smoothly and met stakeholder expectations.

Results

Over the course of ten months, I launched more than 600 campaigns and canvases within Braze—significantly expanding the CRM team’s capacity.

• Enabled faster turnaround for high-priority campaigns tied to cultural events, sometimes creating and launching campaigns end-to-end within three hours.

• Supported the delivery of highly targeted, personalized communications that improved user engagement.

• Streamlined workflows through QA and cross-functional alignment, reducing errors and approval delays.

Ultimately, my contributions helped HBO Max’s CRM team operate more efficiently, execute at scale, and deliver a consistently excellent experience for millions of subscribers.