Today’s most famous tv show with the wider range of public is probably Game of Thrones. Anyone had the opportunity to talk about G.o.T or to watch it at least once since its first release a couple of years ago. But, would you believe me if I tell you that there are still some people who are not G.o.T fans? Well, sorry to disapoint you but that was the case in New Zealand.
At the start of the fourth season of the TV show, SKY television discovered that a part of its audience did not enjoy the G.o.T show. But the television channel came up with the great idea of contacting DDB, the country’s most popular advertising group, to influence the majority of SKY’s audience to become G.o.T fans as well. To do so, DDB analysed the audience and identified the only way to make them like G.o.T was not through the traditional advertising but through the use of friends’ recommendations.
DDB noticed that the most popular character of the show was not the hero, but the most hated one, King Joffrey. The idea was to target a popular location where people of all age would go, the Aotea Square in Auckland, Australia, and they placed a seven meters high statue of the King in this prime location. DDB advertised the live stream of the statue in Aotea Square, which became the Australian most famous live stream in history.
Furthermore, the advertising group influenced visitors of the square to take pictures/selfies and to publish them on social medias with the hashtag: #bringdowntheking.
DDB’s digital planner even stated the idea of: “Brandwatch helped us keep track of which participant had the highest number of followers. We would then engage them further by giving them special status (e.g, an honorary member of House Stark, including visual badge to share)”.
By using Brandwatch Analytics, the global campaign had an important international impact : “the campaign has reached 43million people in 168 countries” with more than 800 000 individual interactions. DDB has helped changing SKY’s audience interest in G.o.T through radios, websites and social media channels in New Zealand.
