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Diamond explains that a lot of thought went into those partnerships. “We knew people were going to be trading on our cultural currency, for us this was about being a part of the conversation and extending an arm to these different brands and saying, ‘Hey we’ll play alongside you guys, but here’s what you have to do. You’ll have to do something that you’ve never done before that you’ll arguably never do again and you’ll do it because of your love of the show.’ That’s really where the #FortheThrone brief was able to flex across all these different verticals, for all these different brands. If you’re a fan of the show, you can do something audacious.”
The most audacious of all, arguably, was Bud Light’s Super Bowl sacrifice. Ferguson says that it all started when the agency came up with the idea, “What if, in the middle of the Super Bowl, we gave the most iconic spot a ‘Game of Thrones’ ending?” They then considered which are the biggest Super Bowl brands and Bud Light rose to the top. “They’ve been an iconic Super Bowl brand for decades,” he says. “It’s a perfect synergy with the fact they’ve got a medieval world. We can do a spot with them and no one would see it coming. We basically wrote a script and pitched it to them and said, ‘Look, we want to kill the Bud knight, in quite a gruesome way and we want to end with the ‘Game of Thrones’ logo, not the Bud Light logo, otherwise we could go to the next people along; it could have been Burger King, it could have been Coca-Cola.’ Amazingly, they said yes and were really up with it.”
This article has been published in collaboration with Adage.com
