How the death of a ‘King’ led to Australasia’s largest live streaming event in history
A Social Media Campaign that Reigned Supreme:
With the start of Game of Thrones (GoT) season 4, SKY saw an opportunity to create a digitally tactical campaign on a relatively small budget that would convince New Zealanders to sign up to SKY and/or it’s paid channel SoHo. DDB (New Zealands Largest Marketing Firm) was challenged with doing something beyond the realms of traditional digital media. The target was to gain new subcribers through customers that has previously described the show at ‘not for them’. Through the usage of Brandwatch Analytics (the world’s leading social intelligence company) the topic of the hated King Joffrey was drumming up the most interest online.
So how did they do it?
DBB decided on an idea based on previous real world dictators. To do so they created a statue of King Joffrey a top a plinth in Aotea square which is the largest public space in Auckland.
DDB then transmitted a live stream from the square with fans encouraged to use the hashtag #bringdowntheking. This hashtag would in turn generate the turning of a wrench in which would slowly bring down the King from his plinth. Brandwatch would then monitor the activity across social media to identify new opportunities to spread the campaign and get more people involved. The campagin came to fruition when the campaign reached a significant New Zealand audience through repeated coverage on New Zealand’s largest news websites, various radio stations, and popular local social media channels. DBB was able to record almost 875,00 individual interactions with the campaign which came to its end on the fifth day at around 18:00 to the delight of numerous fans gathered around the statue and tuned in online. 
But did they achieve their aims?
The aim of the campagin was to gain new subcribers through customers that has previously described the show at ‘not for them’. The campaign showed that by DBB relating the demise of King Joffrey’s statue to recent dictatorships (e.g. Sadam Hussein’s in Baghdad) Game of Thrones became relatable to the previously described ‘not interested’ customers. The big question is, over the campagin how many of the 875,00 who brought the statue down were new customers or went on to take a subscription? This is an answer that we do not know for certain. What we do know is that
The campagin sparked a much higher engagement rate in the Brazilian and French markets (one in which the agency had originally struggled to generate significant interest for the show in).
Michiel Cox Digital Planner for DBB (2014) described Brandwatch as ‘invaluable’ in dealing with the exposure of the campaign calling it a huge success as it became Australasia’s largest live streaming event in history.
You can watch the King Joffrey’s statue being torn down here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3SW5NTd_Xc