The Campaign

As New Zealand’s only pay TV service, SKY TV has zero chance of getting any coverage on free to air TV networks. This makes informing non-subscribers about our brand somewhat tricky, and requires us to think outside the box. So to promote the 4th season premiere of Game of Thrones on SKY TV’s channel SoHo, we implemented a live event that demonstrated we were just as fanatical about good programming as the fans who watch it.

Results

We knew there would be a social media frenzy around the premiere. To show this fanatical commitment, we wanted to make sure we were a major part of that conversation. So we gave fans the one thing they all wanted, the chance to bring down King Joffrey. We erected a 7m statue of the King in NZ’s largest public square, then invited fans worldwide to bring him down via a winch that was activated every time the hashtag #bringdowntheking was used on Twitter. They could watch progress via our website, which streamed the event for the whole 5 days. To keep the story unfolding, we also released daily videos, drawing hundreds of thousands of views in their own right. These also formed easy content that our media partners could release to grow the story. This proved incredibly effective, with New Zealand’s largest newspaper covering the story in 5 separate articles, along with numerous international outlets such as Gizmodo, Forbes and Huffington Post. Daily releases and updates on twitter of images and badges for fans who had contributed in exceptional ways also kept fans coming back to see the campaign unfold, as well as the thousands of photos and videos uploaded by fans on the ground. By the 5th day, the winch had the statue at breaking point. Thousands of fans gathered for hours leading up to the moment, tweeting and watching, while those overseas watched via the streaming website. Finally, at around 6pm on the night of the premiere, the statue was brought down. After Joffrey had caused so much pain for the realm and viewers alike over the last 3 seasons, we had given fans their revenge - reinforcing our stance of being just as fanatical about good TV as those watching are.

To gain immediate traction and to kick-start the conversations, we engaged the hosts of the country’s top-rating radio station (who we knew were fans of the show) to launch the campaign, before securing local and international media coverage to spread the word further. Die-hard Game of Thrones fans were engaged via proactive seeding on fan-sites and on social media.

#bringdowntheking trended on twitter from the moment the campaign started until the day after it went down. Ratings were 20% higher than the previous season’s premiere. Tweets came from 130 countries. Our website was the most viewed live stream in Australasian history. Total reach was 66 million, with 875,000 direct interactions, and thousands of photos and videos posted to Instagram, Tumblr and Youtube. One in every 500 kiwis tweeted about the campaign, and leading up to the international premiere, one in every twenty conversations about Game of Thrones worldwide was in reference to our campaign and in turn, SKY.