HBO Branches Out Into More Fantasy, But Is Their Marketing Turning Off US fans?
I just posted up my Red Sonja piece yesterday, when I received at tweet from HBO promoting the trailer to their new medieval fantasy series The Game of Thrones. Have a look for yourself, as usual they take it to the next level, and it's pure cinema. Sean Bean and Lena Headey were the only faces I recognized amongst the cast, lending it that Lord of the Rings and 300 feel. The show debuted in the US on Sunday 17th April and on the UK's Sky Atlantic on Monday 18th April. What is interesting is that the show scored 2.2 million viewers in the US, and a record-breaking 743,000 viewers for Sky Atlantic. Dan's Media Digest has written an article about the show's ratings, questioning why it has done so well in the UK compared to the US Her theory is that the show's US marketing has turned off potential viewers.
Could the usually highly tuned and progressive marketing for HBO, really have backfired? I really loved all the work they did for True Blood, it was just so imaginative, see this fantastic case-study from agency Campfire on how they used ground-breaking marketing techniques and Transmedia storytelling to get True Blood audiences looking and then hooked.
Perhaps it is going back to what I was writing about yesterday and the impact of Comic-Con, and the danger of:
a) giving fans too much of they want
b) giving away too much plot and content in advance of the show/during the show
Dan suggests this is the case, and that there was an over-kill of content, messaging, behind the scenes of the scenes, almost so fans got bored of the show before it aired. I went to look online myself, and there is masses of content, mostly for the US audiences, and across all platforms. Plus there has been a long lead time in this campaign, the show was announced back in 2009. I couldn't even get to the bottom of HBO's Game of Thrones Official Fan page on Facebook, it is absolutely epic. I have not seen much in way of marketing for the show in the UK, so perhaps part of its success here, is that it is still bit of a mystery.
Out of interest, I checked out the HBO site for Game of Thrones, to see what they are creating for the fans and it is a total treasure trove of content, from avatars, facebook apps (it can even remix your FB page), images, forums and opportunities to create stories. This content also sits in the Sky Atlantic web-pages. The thing that stood out, was this Tolkein-esque interactive map, in which you can literally journey across the show's locations. So you no longer have to go off trawling through fan-sites for created material, almost fan-fiction, without the fans.
For me, as these huge shows put together their campaigns (including trying to emulate/feed the fan-fiction world) is they need to think about restraint. I remember reading marketing communications expert Martin Hayward article earlier this year, about how marketing must align with three ‘r’s – relevance, response and restraint.
a) giving fans too much of they want
b) giving away too much plot and content in advance of the show/during the show
Dan suggests this is the case, and that there was an over-kill of content, messaging, behind the scenes of the scenes, almost so fans got bored of the show before it aired. I went to look online myself, and there is masses of content, mostly for the US audiences, and across all platforms. Plus there has been a long lead time in this campaign, the show was announced back in 2009. I couldn't even get to the bottom of HBO's Game of Thrones Official Fan page on Facebook, it is absolutely epic. I have not seen much in way of marketing for the show in the UK, so perhaps part of its success here, is that it is still bit of a mystery.
Out of interest, I checked out the HBO site for Game of Thrones, to see what they are creating for the fans and it is a total treasure trove of content, from avatars, facebook apps (it can even remix your FB page), images, forums and opportunities to create stories. This content also sits in the Sky Atlantic web-pages. The thing that stood out, was this Tolkein-esque interactive map, in which you can literally journey across the show's locations. So you no longer have to go off trawling through fan-sites for created material, almost fan-fiction, without the fans.
For me, as these huge shows put together their campaigns (including trying to emulate/feed the fan-fiction world) is they need to think about restraint. I remember reading marketing communications expert Martin Hayward article earlier this year, about how marketing must align with three ‘r’s – relevance, response and restraint.
On a different note, I did snigger a bit when reading someplace it was pitched as 'Soprano's meets Middle Earth'. Is that the way to pitch HBO nowadays?
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