How has Winter arrived?

It’s nearly impossible to avoid Game of Thrones. It’s a worldwide phenomenon which has gripped watchers from the outset. Their use of incredible CGI making dragons, giants and amazing fight scenes makes them stand out from the other TV shows currently out at the moment.

It’s so huge now, it’s easy to find someone in a crowded place either discussing the show or wearing the merchandise…it’s everywhere (whether you like it or not).

However, it wasn’t as popular a few years ag0. Sky gave DDB the instruction to create a campaign with minimum cost to increase their fan base. As they were having trouble gaining interest with the New Zealand population, they came up with a creative way to create wide spread attention, with a minimal cost.

DDB used one of the show’s most hated characters, King Joffery as a social media ploy to ensure that people were interactivelly made involved in killing the evil king. In order for Joffery to get his commupence, all fans needed to work together on social media using the hashtag #bringdowntheking to make his rope tighter. The quicker the social media inreaction between fans and the show, the quicker we could feel the satisfaction of having evil King Joffery dead finally.

What was clever about this campaign was that people online with a high follower volume, would get contacted by BrandWatch (who were also working alongside with DDB on the campaign) and given a special status, in the form of a visual badge, to show which House they pledge allegience too.

From this campaign, DDB managed to successfully record 875,000 individual online interactions from fans. This is an incredible success in building their fan base, not only in New Zealand, but worldwide as a result.

To have managed to have also reached 43 million people in over 168 countries is an incredible achievement. It also shows how great social media is to create awareness, especially if you are trying to reach a high amount of people with a small cost.