Game of Thrones, a popular television show, has exclusive rights to be shown in New Zealand by SKY TV – The pre-eminent pay TV in New Zealand. Sky has a home in just under half the households in the country (49.4%). Sky, wanting to improve engangement in regions and countries that were lagging behind in viewship, associated themselves with DDB (one of the most influential ad groups in the world) who were given the goal to promote ‘SoHo’ – a paid channel – to current SKY subscribers and to gain new subscribers. DDB were to create a tactical campaign on a relatively small budget to convince people in New Zealand to sign up to Sky or ‘SoHo’.
The challenge for DDB was that the audience Sky wanted to reach had previously dismissed the show as something that wasn’t for them. Taking this into consideration, they knew that the group was likely to ignore regular Game of Thrones adverts on the general TV channels and therfore wanted to drum up interest in this group via recommendations from friends. Thus, the solution was to generate excitment for the upcoming season by targeting existing fans so to grab the attention of the group who were not fans.
To do this they used Brandwatch analytics to identify the most infleuntial themes within the show and what topics the fans were most passionate about. The result was that King Joffrey was found the be the most intensley hated character based on online discussions. From this, they then drew parallels to real life dictators and proceeded to create a statue of Joffrey with a rope around his neck in a large, popular, public space. They raised the question on social media: “It takes millions bring down a king, but does he deserve it?” People were encouraged to voice their opinion and bring down the king via the #bringdowntheking – which every time it was mentioned, a winch was turned and the rope around his neck pulled tighter and eventually would topple him over.
This generated over 875,000 interactions worldwide, bringing a lot more attention to the series as a result, and increasing subscribers for Sky and ‘SoHo’.
From this case study, it should be noted that social media is a powerful way to generate interest, becoming the new ‘word of mouth’. Not just this, but the use of data analytics (text analytics and web analytics) to gather information on what consumers interests are, what they’re talking about, and they’re feelings on certain topics, can be very useful when deciding how to approach a social media marketing campaign in regards to who to target, what topic to target and in what way you target that those things.