The rugged yet beautiful countryside of Northern Ireland provides the perfect backdrop for the mythical land of Westeros. It’s this wild landscape that brings the show to life.

In January 2016, a major Game of Thrones filming location was hit hard by Storm Gertrude. Amidst the devastation, one thing remained. Wood. And lots of it.

Over 10 weeks, we transformed the trees that fell there that day into 10 beautifully crafted, bespoke doors. Each depicting an episode from GoT season 6. Every week a new door was installed at the beating heart of a Northern Irish community – the local pub of a GoT filming location.

While the world’s media were mourning the loss of these historic trees, we salvaged the wood and used it to build a lasting legacy for fans.

To create the doors, world-class illustrators were given access to plot lines and story details a few days before each episode aired. The illustrations had to be highly relevant, without being so overt as to give away spoilers – so finding a subtle balance was crucial. As well as being inspired by the show, their designs also reflected historical Celtic symbolism and local flora as a tribute to the filming locations of Northern Ireland.

Each of the finished doors was then hung and photographed before being unveiled to the public online and on location - the same day that the corresponding episode aired.

Together the doors now form a pub-crawl through season 6 that spans the length and breadth of the country.

Tourism Ireland was welcomed into Game of Thrones fan culture. For 10 weeks, fans were actively seeking out our content.

Online, fans worked together to decipher the meaning of the designs, tried to guess where the next week’s door would appear, and shared them far and wide within their community.

But most importantly, the Game of Thrones pub-crawl is now a pilgrimage for Game of Thrones fans around the world.

As a result, 2016 proved to be a record year for visitors to Northern Ireland with an 8% increase over 2015, and an additional 300k clicks to Ireland.com.

Contiki and other major independent tour companies across the world have set up tours of all 10 doors, receiving bookings from as far as Japan, the US, and Australia.

The campaign generated an excess of over €17m in earned media from a €140K budget.

All of the pubs reported close to a doubling of profits since the trail was completed, and

an independent report commissioned to assess the impact of GoT driving incremental visits estimated an additional 55k annually, worth in excess of €20m.

MTV: “The Irish Game of Thrones pub crawl is literally everything”

Cosmopolitan: “You NEED to know about this Game of Thrones pub crawl”

ITV News: “These doors are part of Game of Thrones history”

126,000,000+ People Reached

17,500,000+ Views

We used an iconic landmark and major Game of Thrones filming location as the actual media for the campaign itself. By turning a devastated tourist attraction into a brand new one for Game of Thrones fans, we got the shows legions of followers all talking about Northern Ireland. And when millions talked, the mainstream media listened.

The show’s audience already generated a huge amount of chatter and content online, so anything we produced solely through digital channels risked being drowned out.

The fans are also notoriously critical of brands attempting to piggyback on the show’s popularity. So we had to add value to their tight-knit community, in order to spread our message through fan-run social channels and traditional media alike.

By engaging directly with the shows biggest fan sites and bloggers first, inviting them to critique and tour the doors in person, they seeded our content into their feeds and communities. Leaders shared, discussed and explored their hidden secrets and details online - legitimizing the content for their followers and other fans, and by doing so convinced them that seeing each door in person was the next logical step.

By sparking enough of these conversations, mainstream media picked up on the fact that GoT fans everywhere weretalkingaboutNorthernIreland.

Game of Thrones has been filmed on location in Northern Ireland for 6 years. Tourism Ireland tasked us with attracting more fans to visit, and tempting them to travel around the whole country whilst they are there, rather than just staying in the areas surrounding Belfast. We knew that the answer lay in creating a physical experience in the country that fans could visit and be part of, but it wasn’t until a seemingly terrible event occurred that an opportunity presented itself.

A recently devastated iconic 400-year-old tourist attraction known as The Dark Hedges (that’s also one of the show’s most well-known filming locations) became our media, allowing us to draw attention to other filming locations across the country.