Organic content isn’t enough to create an enduring monoculture moment in 2023. Especially when the product being advertised is an entertainment property, emotional investment in a story relies on a robust media plan that can spur organic momentum.

For House of the Dragon, we activated a robust array of media placements that motivate millions of fans to tune into the premiere, and continue watching throughout the entire first season.

Our media efforts ensured not only a huge launch for House of the Dragon, but a sustained interest in the streaming property that kept new subscribers in the HBO Max fold.

“Dracarys.” In Game of Thrones, the word is a command for the show’s iconic dragons to incinerate everything in their path. Consider it also what we set out to do with the U.S. marketing launch for HBO Max’s GoT prequel, House of the Dragon: burn down the house.

Despite Game of Thrones’ massive popularity, we needed to combat franchise fatigue. Thrones remains the #1 viewed HBO title of all time, and its cultural ubiquity was something we would need to consider heavily when building our media strategy.

Further complicating matters: House of the Dragon was HBO Max’s first tentpole post the WB-Discovery merger. New CEO David Zaslav needed a calculated programming win to establish confidence in his leadership. Our top priority was to drive new subscribers, motivating enduring popularity for potential audience expansion.

The final season of Game of Thrones was not an outright triumph. NME reported fans found the show’s finale the second most disappointing ever, meaning our campaign needed to establish a palpable energy to get lapsed fans to emotionally reinvest in House of the Dragon’s universe.

From past successes with key HBO Max properties, we knew an integrated approach across social, digital, OOH, experiential, and home can inspire an initial wave of new subscribers (not to mention high viewership), but also longtail investment in a show’s plotline, characters and audience discourse.

Though the bingeable “all at once” series release model did initially shift consumer behavior, many of our past successes showed how a sustained integrated approach, prioritizing social conversation, can create “monoculture” moments pre-release, at launch, and throughout a staggered series run.

The key would be accomplishing this at an unprecedented scale.

Despite the GoT criticism, we knew millions of U.S. fans would be evangelists for a deeper exploration of Westeros. We would leak organic teasers like key art and first look content a year from launch to switch on early social buzz.

We would bring the show’s iconic dragons to life on eye-catching OOH billboards in major American cities, partnering with an entertainment outfit to spark in-the-moment excitement.

We set aside a healthy budget for traditional mediums, working in show details to popular programming on radio and television.

Meanwhile, we’d also build a sophisticated infrastructure of bespoke partnerships with unconventional media outlets, engaging multi-screen viewers across diverse interests.

For launch, we’d partner with digital publications with experiential savvy to make the premiere feel like a cultural event.

Lastly, we would parlay our momentum with a pulsed media buy across channels during key episode drops, renewing the cycle of hype.

We built interactive 3D billboards featuring HotD’s iconic dragons, setting them loose across NYC/LA. Simultaneously, we took over 49 LiveNation concert venues in the U.S., populating 114 shows with dragon installations.

We became the first in-game sponsor of the pro-eSport Championship League of Legends Series. We created first-of-its-kind content on Roku home screens. We teamed with DuoLingo to teach fans High Valyrian (the show’s language). In addition to large spends on Twitter and Meta, we built custom filters on TikTok and Snapchat.

With “Dragon Week” we took over iHeartRadio week on the airwaves with HOTD chatter, and flexed the WBD TV portfolio to reach millions of US households on linear and digital.

Lastly, we made the premiere the event of the year. Partnering with Conde Nast, we threw watch parties in key cities, posting social content that coincided with digital banners across publications like GQ, Vogue, and Pitchfork.

On premiere day, episode one reached 10 million viewers across linear and HBO Max platforms in the U.S., the largest original series premiere audience in HBO history.

Within the first week, Ep1 tallied 25MM viewers, the fastest viewership growth ever recorded for a single episode in streaming history.

The campaign was an absolute triumph for HBO Max and WB-Discovery’s streaming prospects. Streaming subscriptions rose to 95 million across global customers on HBO, HBO Max and Discovery+ in Q3, a 23% increase vs. Q1, making HOTD #1 subscription driver for HBO Max.

From fanning the flames on social, to setting dragons loose across NYC skyscrapers, to sending League of Legends athletes on quests for Westeros banners, our campaign brought Westeros back with a vengeance, ensuring House of the Dragon was the biggest hit of the year.

“Dracarys.”

In the U.S., lore and fantasy have become an essential factor in the entertainment industry. Some of the continent’s most devoted fan bases obsess over enchanted worlds, legendary characters, and era-spanning backstories.

Fandoms like those cherish authenticity, especially regarding anything peripheral to what they consider canon (officially part of the imagined world). Something that feels “wrong” is instinctual to them, and they’ll often express it on social media (e.g. fan backlash against the Game of Thrones finale: their beloved characters didn’t get the ending fans felt they deserved).

Fantasy fans view the world of Westeros as an escape. They invest in characters, storylines, and the decisions that alter fates. They revel in the fully-realized environmental details. This creative ethos guided our media partnerships and creative strategy, bringing the rich world of HotD to every universe.