Game of Thrones has some of the noisiest and most ardent fans in the world.

And they’re less geeky and weird than you might think…

When you speak to them, they don’t talk about dragons and fantasy. They talk about explosive plot twists, fantastic storytelling, engrossing characters, and so on. All of the things we know our target audience already love. So we decided to use this to our advantage.

We created a battle plan to rally an army of fans and get them talking passionately about the show in a way that would resonate with our audience.

And finally convince them to surrender to Game of Thrones by catching up on all 5 season on Sky Box Sets.

The implementation of this campaign ran over a number of phases across multiple touch points.

Phase 1: Targeted DRTV and Email encouraging existing customers to sample the first season for free, generating conversation

Phase 2: Utilised influencers in the form of celebrity Game of Thrones fans to tell everyone why they should “Surrender to Game of Thrones” through their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Phase 3: Built on initial social conversation by encouraging people to create sharable, online content that showed why their friends should #SurrenderToGoT, stimulated through a social competition.

Phase 4: Capitalised on social conversation and drove awareness through the use of real fan quotes and advocacy across visual press, tube/OOH and TV.

Utilising all of the above, helped convert hold outs and lapsed fans into a legion of new viewers – driving upgrades to Sky Box Sets and viewership of Season 6 on Sky Atlantic

71m impressions, 13.5m engagement and 13m video views.

The first episode of Game of Thrones Season 6 was Sky’s most watched entertainment show of all time with nearly 5 million viewers.

• The new series opener had 2.2 million viewers when it returned on 25 April 2016

• Another 1.6 million recorded it or watched it on demand.

• Another 1 million views of the episode were delivered through the Sky Go mobile app and Now TV platform

Total views of 4.8 million

This was over a million more viewers than the final episode of season five, which was previously Sky’s most watched TV show.

By the end of week one the campaign was already at well over double the 1.7m paid video views that Mediacom had identified for the whole campaign.