ABSTRACT
In advance of Game of Thrones’ premiere in 2011, HBO launched a multi-platform marketing campaign that included websites, food trucks, and a finely crafted box containing scents of Westeros sent to critics and bloggers. The campaign reached out to fans, invited new viewers, and most of all, aimed to convince HBO subscribers that a fantasy series fit into the channel’s “quality TV” brand (Bourdaa 2014: 23). Game of Thrones became one of HBO’s biggest hits, leading those involved in the initial marketing to believe that the courting of fans shaped this success (Campfire 2012). HBO’s marketing campaign includes transmedia storytelling, “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2011). Transmedia balances marketing and world-building, often in uneasy ways, and is part of the shifting relationship between industry and audiences in the convergence era. Transmedia projects thus exist on a spectrum between multi-platform storytelling and promotion. Crucially, transmedia success depends on fans’ emotional investment in a text. Even the most cursory engagement with transmedia requires enough interest to click on a link to an online puzzle or a tie-in video.
