Summary

The case study summarises the efforts that DDB New Zealand made for Sky in order to boost their sales and subscriptions of their paid channel SoHo, to current Sky subscribers and to new customers for the release of 4th season of Game of Thrones. In order to increase these sales DDB thought it was important for recommendations from friends to drum up in interest in Game of Thrones to those who had not been interested previously.

In order to do this they needed the interest of the current fans, to influence people who had not watched it before. They utilised BrandWatch Analytics to listen to conversations around the TV show in New Zealand in order to identify the most influential themes in the show. They found that the most discussed and hated character was King Joffrey. DDB realised they could rally the online community around their shared hatred for Joffrey and make their passion for the show palpable across New Zealand.

DDB decided to make a 7 metre statue of the character on a plinth, complete with a winch and rope and placed him in a popular prime location, Aotea Square in Auckland. DDB then transmitted a live stream from the square, which became Australasia’s largest live streaming event in history. This in itself creates a huge buzz around the campaign as it was something that hadn’t been done before. Fans were then encouraged to make their voices heard and bring down the king through the power of social media, using a unique hashtag which would turn the winch and make the rope tighter around the King, eventually toppling him over. During the execution of the campaign, Brandwatch was used extensively to find opportunities to grow the campaign and to get more people involved, as well as tracking and analyzing the usage of the hashtag.