Gimmick of Thrones!

July 28, 2020

Gimmick of Thrones!

Gimmick of Thrones

This article is not a review of the TV/web (Hotstar premium) series named GOT – which though carries a lot of credit to turn many into passionate viewers of the series for those 8 years. I neither intent to compete with the ‘share of thoughts’ each viewer has left in the social media platforms, nor I can provide any unique criticism which was not told before. This article is strictly restricted to a perspective on the substantial fan-base GOT has acquired and still continues.

Don’t we ever wonder how we were so glued in a story that we not only discussed almost everyday for the rest of the years, but also acted in a way that it affects our own daily life?- as if our life would no longer be the same if Jon Snow dies or if Arya Stark doesn’t get her eyesight back! It’s a long statement, let’s break the emotion part by part J

All these gulping emotions are nothing but the outcome of a neatly planned promotional strategy where a global team from marketing unit invests days and months to read, synthesize the viewers’ minds and associate it with their preferences, demographics and sentiments to forecast and influence their behaviour in order to attract them, keeping them always hooked into it. This results into an ever increasing curve of accumulation of viewers, spike in TRPs and of course 58 Emmy awards.

My idea is to play a devil’s advocate on few of the probable steps leveraged by the GOT promotion team which may have contributed to this success bigtime.

1. Moving away from the book: What do you think about ‘plot twists’ in GOT where the novel was already published long back and in everybody’s reach? The marketers took a great advantage of director’s freedom where the original story was a little moulded in many places. It creates an illusion to the viewers that ‘anything can happen’ and push them to play around their imagination on what may happen.

2. Targeting: Remember Harry Potter? The readers hardly appreciate the movies still today as they always find that major philosophies were not touched in those movies which are important to be told to stitch a few conclusions. To ensure no spoiler, sometimes the book publications had to be scheduled according to the movie releases. But in case of GOT, it is different. Here the marketers always try to attract the ‘non-reader’ community in their target who love the extravaganza of the screen more than books which contributes to a fair portion of 90-95% of the overall viewers [some people had read the books after the success of the series].

3. Hovering on Fan theories: We wonder how people used to come up with their multiple versions of the truth and share their ideas about ‘better alternatives’. We hardly have seen that any other web series (like Breaking Bad or The Americans) created that platform for the viewers where people can debate around the complexities and layers of the plots and sub plots and bring perspectives in each. It not only encouraged us to stick to the channel, but also gave us always something to think through later.

4. Reigning the Media: Marketers exploited every nitty-gritty of the social platforms to encourage each and every blog, tweet, and posts, letting the viewers explore their all other imaginary faculties beyond the ‘fan-theories’ and come up with their creative skill in terms of making a youtube video or creating a facebook meme and in the process, experience a little fame within the community.

5. Fighting Peer Pressure: This is my favourite topic among all. The scariest thing for today’s digital generation is FOMO- Fear of Missing Out. There is a desperate need of most of the ‘social’ people [read who use social media] is to be up to date and sometimes ahead of their friends. Marketers use FOMO to the fullest in their campaign strategy. How? –The campaigns are not restricted to the advertisements or promotions of the trailers, but a huge part of the promotion depends on ‘word of mouth’. It’s a viral strategy, though age old, but works everytime. For GOT- it actually created a ‘never ending loop’ of ‘word of mouth’ where people loved discussing GOT in their peer group and also outside of that and remained updated with all of its ‘fan theories’, ‘memes’ and with the additional information which only could be found in the book or some ‘uncredited’ articles. Belonging in the GOT clan-became the status symbol for all the fans, which imposed a huge pressure for the non-viewers to taste the other side of the world.

No, do not get me wrong. I am not undermining the spectacular story-telling, or the mesmerizing cinematography or the uniqueness of the plot (by R R Martin) which I’m pretty sure, many of the gen Ys would possibly contemplate to categorize as an ‘epic’ in our time. I am saying that, despite all these, it takes a lot more sincere efforts to concur an over 30 million viewer base which doesn’t come easily specially in this Netflix-Hotstar era where competition is highly fierce.

All the above few points are some evidences of these marketing efforts [read gimmick] of a well-organized team who perhaps made it their lives’ goal to entice us, fascinate us. And we? We continued in the world where we breathe GOT, bleed GOT and boast GOT as the best drama series ever viewed!

Background: Game of Thrones is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO. It is an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin's series of fantasy novels (1996). The series premiered on April 17, 2011, and concluded on May 19, 2019, with 73 episodes broadcast over eight seasons. By season seven, the average viewer numbers had grown from 2.2 million (in 1st episode) to 32.8 million per episode across all platforms. The series received 58 Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series in 4 consecutive years, three Hugo Awards , a Peabody Award, and five nominations for the Golden Globe Awards.