Results and Effectiveness

#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.

Creative Execution

Our live streaming website was the hub of the campaign and its own media channel, allowing fans to watch progress whenever they wanted for the entire duration. With over 300,000 visitors (NZ Population 4.5 million), it even had other brands attempt to capitalize on its popularity, trying to erect their own temporary signs in view of the cameras. But away from the site was where we achieved our awareness. By encouraging Twitter users to use our hashtag, we had a campaign reach of 42million from tweets alone. And with the hashtag grouping all social media posts, thousands of photos and videos were accessible through Instagram and Facebook. Our daily video releases also kept the story developing throughout the campaign, drawing hundreds of thousands of views, as well as supplying fresh content to paid and non-paid media outlets covering the story. NZ’s largest paper ran 5 articles on the campaign alone.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

To promote the 4th season premiere of Game of Thrones on premium SKY TV cable channel SoHo, we wanted to demonstrate SKY were just as fanatical about good programming as the fans who watch it. We knew there would be a social media frenzy around the premiere. To show this fanatical commitment, we wanted to make sure we were part of that conversation. So we gave fans the one thing they all wanted - the chance to bring down the universally despised 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 five days. The statue also brought in numerous non-fans, the sheer scale enough to pique interest.