In accordance with Cardwell, the objective was to current two sides of the story with out judgment, with the trailers mirroring one another even right down to the final traces.
“The allegiances would possibly change, or folks’s opinions would possibly change over this sequence, and that was necessary to us,” Cardwell mentioned. “We didn’t need to information anybody or make anybody assume someway. We needed to current each side of the story, make an argument and let the followers select.”
Although the advertising and marketing group anxious one aspect can be favored, the trailers have come out pretty even in viewership. As an illustration, as of this text’s publishing time, the Black trailer has 10 million views on Max’s YouTube web page, and the Inexperienced trailer has practically 9 million.
Season 2’s advertising and marketing follows up a marketing campaign for Season 1 that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav known as “the most important marketing campaign in HBO historical past.”
Season 1’s advertising and marketing occurred at a novel time for the corporate, with the sequence launching simply months after Discovery and WarnerMedia finalized a $43 billion merger. As well as, the marketing campaign had the duty of reaching the previous Recreation of Thrones fanbase, together with viewers who had been disillusioned following the Season 8 finale.
“Once we had been taking a look at how we had been going to launch the primary season, we took into consideration that there was a really vocal, however finally a small faction, of the web that had these emotions about Recreation of Thrones, however by and huge there have been nonetheless a number of followers on the market that had been very enthusiastic about Home of the Dragon,” Cardwell mentioned. “It was additionally at a time after we had been coming into a brand new firm, in order entrepreneurs, it was fairly thrilling as a result of we had all these levers to drag that we had by no means had earlier than, the entire Warner Bros. Discovery ecosystem.”
The marketing campaign concerned quite a few activations enjoying host to 1000’s of attendees, a dynamic AR app that lets followers increase dragons of their very own, an official podcast that dives deeper into episodes and a number of other cross-portfolio promotions, serving to the sequence on its solution to averaging practically 30 million viewers per episode.
Storyline breadcrumbs are coming…
In accordance with Cardwell, the Season 2 marketing campaign will observe in Season 1’s footsteps and “take cues from the fandom.”
“We’re simply so fortunate to work on IP like this that’s so wealthy and nuanced and operates on this grey area the place it’s not simply white hats and black hats. It’s not Group Edward and Group Jacob,” Cardwell mentioned. “It permits us to be inventive and discuss to followers in a means that’s genuine, and I believe finally is an effective mirror of the present itself.”
