BRING DOWN THE KING

Silver Spike

Case Film

Presentation Board

TitleBRING DOWN THE KING
BrandSKY TELEVISION
Product / ServiceGAME OF THRONES SEASON 4 LAUNCH
CategoryA06. Use of Special Events And Stunt/Live Advertising
EntrantDDB GROUP NEW ZEALAND Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Entrant Company DDB GROUP NEW ZEALAND Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Advertising Agency DDB GROUP NEW ZEALAND Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Media Agency OMD Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Production Company FINCH Auckland, NEW ZEALAND

Credits

Name Company Position
Shane Bradnick DDB Group New Zealand Executive Creative Director
Chris Schofield DDB Group New Zealand Creative Director
Haydn Kerr DDB Group New Zealand Digital Creative Director
Rory Mckechnie DDB Group New Zealand Creative
Adam Thompson DDB Group New Zealand Creative
James Blair DDB Group New Zealand Senior Account Director
Georgia Newton DDB Group New Zealand Account Manager
Tania Jeram DDB Group New Zealand Agency Producer
Judy Thompson DDB Group New Zealand Executive Agency Producer
Paul Pritchard DDB Group New Zealand Digital Director
Liz Knox DDB Group New Zealand Digital Executive Producer
Sam Schrey DDB Group New Zealand Senior Digital Designer
Jason Vertongen DDB Group New Zealand Lead Designer
Cameron Crosby DDB Group New Zealand Lead Developer
Cain Coulton DDB Group New Zealand Developer
Sean Brown DDB Group New Zealand/Mango Senior Account Director
Eleisha Balmer DDB Group New Zealand/Mango Senior Account Manager
Jack Murphy DDB Group New Zealand Social Planner
Michiel Cox DDB Group New Zealand Digital Planner
Troy Goodall IDC Photographer
Rob Galluzzo Finch Executive Producer
Michael Hilliard Finch Executive Producer
Camilla Dehnert Finch Producer
Bruce Everard Finch Production Designer

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.