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.

We erected a 7m statue of Joffrey 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. Every time they talked online about the show, they could simply add our hashtag to help get rid of the world’s most despised character at the same time. They could watch progress via our website, which live streamed the event for the whole 5 days.

#bringdowntheking trended on twitter from the moment the campaign started until the day after it went down, at many points highest trending. Tweets came from 130 countries, including Antarctica. It was the most viewed live stream in Australasian history, with an average time of 3mins spent on the website. The campaign reached 66 million people, with 875,000 direct interactions, plus thousands of photos and videos posted to instagram, tumblr and youtube. In the four days leading up to the international premiere, one in every twenty conversations about Game of Thrones worldwide was about our campaign and in turn, our client.