#Bringdowntheking – How twitter ended King Joffrey’s reign – Case Study


This blog will analyse the promotional campaign carried out by DDB, in relation to Game of Thrones Season 4. More specifically it will look at the role Brandwatch, an industry leader in social media monitoring and analytics platforms played in allowing the campaign to be as effective as possible.

Background of the case:

With the start of Game of Thrones Season 4, the exclusive broadcaster in New Zealand – SKY, saw the launch of the new season as an opportunity to promote its paid channel SoHo to current Sky subscribers and sign up new customers. To do this SKY enlisted the help of New Zealand’s leading ad agency DDB to create a tactical campaign to convince New Zealanders to sign up to Sky and/or SoHo.  SKY wanted this campaign to reach an audience that had previously dismissed Game of Thrones saying “it was not for them”, however they knew this audience would likely dismiss Game of Thrones related adverts.

DDB opted to target an audience which were already excited by Game of Thrones, to reach the audience who previously dismissed Game of Thrones. The thinking behind this strategy was that the excitement of the current fans would be perfectly suited to generating attention of those who weren’t interested originally.

DDB had to make the campaign more specific to a New Zealand audience. DDB did this by using a social media and analytics platform called Brandwatch. Brandwatch helped DDB by listening to conversations about the show online in New Zealand to identify the most influential theme in the show as King Joffrey. DDB, using rules, categories, topics and tagging processes were able to compare volume and tone of different aspects of the show and identify Joffrey as the most popular discussion topic and using sentiment analysis showed he also inspired the most passionate commentary.

 

My Takeaways:  

My takeaway I would like to discuss in regards to this campaign is the use of Brandwatch. With increasing technology available to ‘marketeers’  we are able to be more specific than ever before in choosing who we target our campaigns at, this is vital in ensuring the campaign budget is used efficiently. Brandwatch gathers millions of conversations every day and provides its clients with tools to analyse them, enabling brands & agencies to make smarter data driven business decisions.

In this case study Brandwatch helped DDB & SKY to identify the main theme they should base their campaign around, the controversial character of King Joffrey. SKY wanted to demonstrate to their audience the passion they have for the content they roll out by doing something beyond the boundaries of traditional or digital media.

DDB opted to compare this hated character in the GoT fanbase to a hated character by many in real life. DDB chose to erect a 7 meter tall statue of Joffrey (similar to the Saddam Hussein statue) in Aotea Square in Auckland, New Zealand. They then transmitted a live stream from the square which became Australasia’s’ largest live streaming event. To encourage fan interaction the statue had a rope around it’s neck and with each tweet including #bringdowntheking the rope got tighter giving Game of Thrones fan’s the chance to enact their own revenge on Joffrey.

The campaign was hugely successful reaching 43 million people in 168 countries with 875,000 individual interactions. The reason they were able to have such high interactions and a interactive campaign was due to the specific market research Brandwatch enabled them identify.

Read more about the campaign here:

http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/television/game-of-thrones-fans-can-tear-down-a-real-life-statue-of-king-joffrey-using-the-power-of-twitter

For more info on Brandwatch please visit: https://www.brandwatch.com/brandwatch-analytics/

 

 

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