Summary of the Game of Thrones Case Study

New Zealand has around 1.6 million households in June 2012 with Sky broadcasting to 49.4% of the housing market with an audience market share of around 29.8%. They also own the exclusive rights to Game of Thrones. To promote GOT and increase subscriptions Sky used social media to broadcast their marketing plan. Using DDB Sky created more awareness for the show and in turn gained more subscriptions to the network. The way in which this was done was DDB figured that friend recommendations were working the best as people were speaking about GOT so much to people who were previously uninterested, resulting in gaining interest and subscribing.

Using Brandwatch Analytics to find topics with large amounts of online discussion and opinion it was found that the character King Joffrey was most spoken on. DDB used this tool very well as it allowed to them pick out the character so Sky could market him as the “headline” when advertising the show, in turn gaining more subscriptions due to such large amounts of conversation being generated. In Auckland, NZ there was a marketing strategy to build a statue of King Joffrey with the statues neck being tied to a noose. The statue was linked to a twitter hashtag #bringdowntheking, everytime this was entered on twitter the noose would become tighter. This resulted in Brandwatch recording over 875,000 tweets using the hashtag previously mentioned.

With so much buzz around Game of Thrones and the amount of discussion and opinionated conversations that Brandwatch Analytics picked up it showed incredibly high interest suggesting that people who were once uninterested are now watching the programme and subscribing to Sky contracts based on the build up one show has caused.