How do you promote the most popular TV show in history? Do you even need to?

While HBO was preparing to say goodbye to its biggest draw, they also had several spin-offs in the works. We needed to prove that Game of Thrones doesn’t die with the show’s finale—it could be as enduring a franchise as Lord of the Rings.

So, in addition to our initial objective of building anticipation and viewership of the premiere, we also defined for HBO an entirely new objective altogether: transform a single show into an enduring franchise and cement its legacy for years to come.

Our way in? Demonstrating the scope and scale of the show’s global fandom.

In Game of Thrones, characters have sacrificed everything to sit on the Iron Throne. But in the real world, fans have had it far too easy. So we turned the tables and put fans to the test, dropping 360-videos of six full-size thrones in six remote locations, challenging fans to find them before time ran out using cryptic clues and hints within the videos: time of day, geography, weather patterns, wildlife sounds and carefully planted Easter eggs.

Fans immediately banned together to analyze the videos, using only 3 hours of 360 footage to pinpoint the thrones. Some even went to the edges of the earth to sit on them. The first to each throne got a ticket to the premiere; the rest got an epic selfie.

GoT knew their global fan base would form alliances to crack the clues in the videos and complete the Quests.

Game of Thrones is no mere book or show—it’s become an entire cultural world, filled with creativity and fueled by unparalleled fandom and devotion.

In order to claim GoT’s place in entertainment franchise history, we needed to clearly demonstrate this. We first needed a platform to prove the lengths to which the world—from fans to brands—would go #ForTheThrone.

#ForTheThrone acted as a tacit challenge to the world, whipping them into a frenzy in the lead-up to the final season’s premiere. What might they sacrifice for the throne? What might they create for the throne? Might they bleed for the throne? Might they drop everything and quest into the wilderness based on a wild hunch they got from a YouTube video on the off chance they find a prop throne there and win tickets to the premiere?

With “Quest,” we wanted to find out.

We placed six thrones in six remote locations and challenged people to find them before time ran out. With only 360 videos and a few cryptic clues, fans banned together on social, analyzing time of day, geography, weather, nature sounds and planted Easter eggs. Each throne was incredibly difficult to pinpoint and almost impossible to physically reach.

We dropped the Throne of the Forest in the middle of a 14-acre forest in England, the Throne of the North in the isolated Swedish Lapland, the Throne of Valyria in the Brazilian sand dunes, the Throne of Joy outside a 12th-century Spanish castle, the Throne of Crypt inside a NYC Civil War torpedo battery and the Throne of Ice on the Canadian tundra.

In total, we had 45,309,254 organic fan engagements on owned posts (3.4x GoT benchmarks), and fans traveled over 2.9 million miles to complete the Quests.

Quest #ForTheThrone became the ultimate proof of GoT’s unique ability to inspire devotion, ingenuity, love, community and adventure. Over the course of this leg of the campaign, we:

Generated 38K online mentions and over 29.4K social comments from 93 countries across the internet

Generated 1.4K articles and news segments with a 1.6B potential reach

Garnered $14.8M in advertising value equivalency from news and broadcast coverage

Garnered over 30K confirmed visits to the thrones by fans from 6 countries

Inspired fans to travel up to 3K kilometers to reach certain remote thrones (Brazil, Sweden)

Totaled over 4.8M kilometers traveled by fans to reach the thrones

Distance traveled estimated from self reported HBO release information filled out by fans who reached the thrones.