How The Marketing of Game of Thrones Perpetuates Medievalism
When teaching medievalism to students in the modern period there are some very obvious choices to point to: novels such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, video games such as Skyrim, and basically any modern movie with a medieval setting. However, none of these examples have used medievalism to the extent that the HBO series Game of Thrones has. Specifically looking at the marketing campaign of the series allows students to gain insight into how the modern world perceives the medieval and just how much our society craves it. In his “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco discusses the ways in which the medieval period can be viewed by a modern audience. While the world George R. R. Martin has created can definitely be seen as “a barbaric age,” it is the combination of categories that holds fans’ attention. A barbaric age, a golden age, and even a stage on which modern issues can be discussed is presented in this world. The show’s fan base grows with each season and those fans want to become increasingly involved. The involvement with the television series does not stop at simply watching. There are numerous ways in which fans can interact with the show and with each other creating a whole universe of fan interaction.
Social media is a huge outlet for fans to connect and discuss the show. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube all give the fans an environment to connect and discuss. An article by Colin Cheng entitled “Game of Thrones: Digital Marketing Case Study,” explores how the television series presents itself on various social media platforms and how wildly successful they were. It is the marketing campaign and how this drew fans in and involved them in a medievalist world that is being looked at here. Jeff Beer’s article “Winter is Always Coming: How HBO Wins the Game of Social Media” explains the ways in which the creators and marketing experts of the show present such a successful campaign. He explains that there are various levels at which a fan can engage with the material which makes it more accessible to a wide audience. On top of this the greatest marketing strategy is that there is and was constant involvement with the show. Just because the season is over does not mean that everyone stops talking about it.
Constant and in-depth involvement in the show and universe that George R. R. Martin has created leaves fans craving more and finding themselves satisfied. Some of the numerous marketing stunts were: #BringDownTheKing, #RoastJoffrey, and Beautiful Death. However, for the purposes of immersing the viewers in a medievalist experience, it was the Campfire campaigns that were the most successful. Both Lisbeth Kalstrup and Susana Tosca’s chapter, “Game of Thrones: Transmedial Words, Fandom, and Social Gaming” from Storyworlds Across Media: Towards A Media-Conscious Narratology, as well as Mihika Barua’s article “How HBO Sells Fantast: The ‘Game of Thrones’ Customer Journey,” explain in detail the various marketing campaigns. Kalstrup and Tosca’s chapter goes into great detail about what the Campfire “immersive fan engagement program” entailed. Basically, the program was based around immersing the five senses in the world of Game of Thrones, a pseudo-Medieval world. For smell specific people were sent boxes of scents to share with their followers on Youtube, hearing took fans into a virtual tavern, sight took viewers up the wall, for feeling a weather app was produced for the world of Westeros, and finally taste allowed fans to eat off of a Game of Thrones themed menu and food truck. On top of this fans could complete challenges in the “Maester’s Path” to gain sneak previews of the upcoming season. It is Kalstrup and Tosca’s chapter that examines a study produced from this campaign gauging the fans’ level of enjoyment. For the most part fans were thrilled with the experience and this contributed to a higher level of new viewers for the subsequent seasons. However, many disliked that the campaign wanted them to involve their friends via social media websites.
While this marketing campaign can be seen as an excellent example for how to market a television series for a class on marketing, it also shows how excited old fans and even newcomers can get about a medievalist society. The trick here is that many people may not associate the world of Game of Thrones with the medieval period, perhaps they view it as its own fantasy world. To get past this, and using this marketing campaign in the classroom to teach about medievalism and how the medieval period is view today, an educator should draw parallels between what was experienced through the Campfire campaign and the medieval world. Perhaps, funds permitting, a journey of the five senses could be put together for the medieval period including scents, food, tangible objects, sounds, and visuals. When teaching about medievalism of even the medieval period it is very important to see the society as vibrant and alive as there is a tendency in the modern age to disassociate with the past and view historical figures as characters in a book rather than real people. By bringing the five senses into play it will allow students to feel and get a sense of what the medieval people would have been feeling. This is the beauty of this marketing campaign, it immerses the fan in the world of Westeros, and this is what teachers of medieval history should be doing to promote the study of the past. If the funds are not available students could get into groups and posit what could have been used to immerse the five senses in the medieval world. However, this activity would have to be very guided and come from a place of firm knowledge of the period since there would be a risk of jokes being made about mud, filth, and other foul smells and sights. Possible tools to guide this sort of activity would be medieval cook books, a look at agriculture, or medieval castles to cover some of the sense and get a feel for what the world would have been like in the past.
Resources
Beer, Jeff. “Winter is Always Coming: How HBO Wins the Game of Social Media.” Fast Company, 2014.
Black, Maggie. “The Medieval Cookbook.” New York : Thames and Hudson, 1992.
Cheng, Colin. “Game of Thrones: Digital Marketing Case Study.” Digital Doughnut, 2015.
Eco, Umberto. “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. by W. Weaver, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1986
Kalstrup, Lisbeth and Susana Tosca’s, “Game of Thrones: Transmedial Words, Fandom, and Social Gaming” in Storyworlds Across Media: Towards A Media-Conscious Narratology. Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon. University of Nebraska: Nebraska, 2014.
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