Let's Catch a Dragon
In the past seven years, have you ever heard someone saying: “winter is coming” in late autumn? If you have, probably you are surrounded by fans of Game of Thrones. Published by HBO, Game of Thrones quickly became one of the most popular TV series all over the world after the release of its first season. Since then, millions of people look forward to the release of new seasons every year. Undoubtedly, the high qualified story is the key to their success. However, at the same time, we should also notice the excellent job Game of Thrones did in social media campaign which helped them attract more audience. Today, we are going to talk about the campaign they did in 2015 on Twitter-- #CatchDrogon.
#CatchDrogon was a warm-up for the premiere of Game of Thrones Season five. What GOT did is that they turned the campaign into an interactive game. For people who wanted to join the game, they needed to choose a bait which was a picture of anything that could attract dragons. Then they needed to post a tweet with the picture they chose as well as the hashtag #CatchDrogon. The “dragon” would show up and reply them later in the day, but the reply would only exist for a few minutes. To capture the dragon, the audience needed to take a screenshot before the reply disappeared. For the people who successfully seize the dragon, GOT would send them a short preview of season 5 or some physical prizes.
As a result, the campaign gained a great success. In just one day, the campaign generated over 74,000 tweets and 6.6 million interactions in total. What’s more important, it attracted more than one million new viewers to the show. As you can see in the following screenshot of Google trends, there is a peak on April 12th, which is the day they started the campaign.
The reason why #CatchDrogon was so successful is that GOT knew how to tap into the groundswell.
As Li and Bernoff mentioned in the textbook Groundswell, companies need to know what their people and followers are expecting. In the case of GOT, they knew what their audience wanted to know. The campaign #CatchDrogon was tightly connected with the storyline of GOT. At the end of season four, Daenerys lost her most fierce dragon--Drogon, and audience were curious about where the dragon would be in the next season(season 5). Thus, GOT decided to do the campaign and let the audience find Drogon by themselves before the premiere of season five. GOT knew that their audience would be interested in the topic, and they used a fun way for the audience to engage in the event.
Besides, by using the interactive game on social media, GOT also created a sense of engaging in the story of GOT for the audience. As we all know that sometimes it can be hard for TV episodes to create the sense of engagement as the audience are sitting in front of the TV screen not “inside” the screen. However, by launching an interactive game on social media, GOT combined the world in the story and the world in people’s real life together. They break the dimension wall between the two worlds and let their audience realize the dream of engaging in the story.
Thank you Game of Thrones, for bringing us such a good story and an interesting interactive activity on social media!
#CatchDrogon was a warm-up for the premiere of Game of Thrones Season five. What GOT did is that they turned the campaign into an interactive game. For people who wanted to join the game, they needed to choose a bait which was a picture of anything that could attract dragons. Then they needed to post a tweet with the picture they chose as well as the hashtag #CatchDrogon. The “dragon” would show up and reply them later in the day, but the reply would only exist for a few minutes. To capture the dragon, the audience needed to take a screenshot before the reply disappeared. For the people who successfully seize the dragon, GOT would send them a short preview of season 5 or some physical prizes.
As a result, the campaign gained a great success. In just one day, the campaign generated over 74,000 tweets and 6.6 million interactions in total. What’s more important, it attracted more than one million new viewers to the show. As you can see in the following screenshot of Google trends, there is a peak on April 12th, which is the day they started the campaign.
The reason why #CatchDrogon was so successful is that GOT knew how to tap into the groundswell.
As Li and Bernoff mentioned in the textbook Groundswell, companies need to know what their people and followers are expecting. In the case of GOT, they knew what their audience wanted to know. The campaign #CatchDrogon was tightly connected with the storyline of GOT. At the end of season four, Daenerys lost her most fierce dragon--Drogon, and audience were curious about where the dragon would be in the next season(season 5). Thus, GOT decided to do the campaign and let the audience find Drogon by themselves before the premiere of season five. GOT knew that their audience would be interested in the topic, and they used a fun way for the audience to engage in the event.
Besides, by using the interactive game on social media, GOT also created a sense of engaging in the story of GOT for the audience. As we all know that sometimes it can be hard for TV episodes to create the sense of engagement as the audience are sitting in front of the TV screen not “inside” the screen. However, by launching an interactive game on social media, GOT combined the world in the story and the world in people’s real life together. They break the dimension wall between the two worlds and let their audience realize the dream of engaging in the story.
Thank you Game of Thrones, for bringing us such a good story and an interesting interactive activity on social media!
I really enjoy your writing every time. You mention about the Game of Thrones, it has already shot as a YV episode and attract more people to watch and join in. I have seen more campaigns from your post like you said, the Titter is one of the social media they used to advertise the game. I cannot imagine the game becomes other forms of media, that's so interesting, cool!
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