Summary

Game of Thrones producers established that the population in New Zealand had room for growth. In order to drive engagement they enlisted the marketers at Brandwatch. They drove fans of Game of Thrones to discuss the show to make people who thought the show ‘wasn’t for them’ to then become viewers. The conversation was based around King Joffrey as although it was not the most popular topic of conversation, it created the most passionate commentary, due the the vast amount of hatred surreounding him, enthralling people to watch the programme.

Brandwatch created a seven metre statue of King Joffrey complete with a winch and rope in Aotea Square, the largest public space in New Zealand, to draw a parallel with notorious real world dictators. This was then put on live stream so every tweet with #bringdowntheking would turn the winch and pull the rope a fraction tighter, eventually toppling the King, view here.

Through the use of Big Data, Brandwatch could track of participants with the highest number of followers, honouring them with special status to engage them further. The volume of mentions per country were charted and grouped by country, where there were lower level country volumes, these were identified and local Game of Thrones communities were reached out to in their local language.

Takeaways?

Engaging content that people can interact with gains huge exposure allowing you to meet an even wider audience than initially anticipated.

Tracking Facebook pages and grouping these with wider queries was found to be particularly useful.

Big Data

This highlighted that though the use of viewers’ interaction between each other and identifying key figures in the virtual world, engagement can be huge. Through the use of Big Data 43 million people in 168 countries were reached, recording almost 875,000 individual interactions, including New Zealand news sites, radio, social media channels.