How DDB, through the use of social media, made quite a stir across Australasia with a King Joffrey effigy. (Game of Thrones Season 4).

With the start of GoT’s season 4 looming, SKY wanted to promote it’s highly anticipated show. Working closely with SKY, DDB set themselves a goal, a challenge and a solution.

1. The Goal – To create a tactical campaign (on a relatively small budget) to convince New Zealander’s to sign up to a SKY subscription package.

2. The Challenge – To infiltrate the ‘non-game-of-throners’. With a high fan base to the series, the population that dismissed the show as ‘not for them’, were to be targeted through non-traditional advertising tactics.

3. The Solution – DDB harnessed the most relevant and talked about character in the show using conversation analytics, King Joffrey. The character had fans creating arresting and mostly derogative conversations through social media outlets. Equipping a promotion with this loathed character is to were the solution was applied.

DDB composed a thought provoking effigy of King Joffrey in Auckland’s ‘Times Square’, from here DDB omitted a live stream which subsequently became Australasia’s largest live streaming event in history. A success for DDB an SKY.

Furthermore, DDB imposed an online conversation encouraging fans to bring down the effigy of the boy king. Tweets with the hashtag #bringdowntheking would turn the winch on the effigy which eventually would topple the hated boy king.

With the timely use of this campaign and a controversial television character in Aotea Square, Auckland, DDB subsequently went viral. The campaign reached 43 million people in 168 countries. Using Brandwatch Analytics, DDB was able to record 875,000 individual interactions.

The impact of this campaign was substantial, and the use of Brandwatch’s Analytics was imperative in capturing the exposure that DDB’s campaign received through the global media, the local impact and the cumulative reach of the campaign.

 

The full case study of DDB and Brandwatch’s campaign is available at: https://www.brandwatch.com/case-study-game-of-thrones/