May 30, 2019 – Game of Thrones promotion of Croatia – the public versus the private sector. An update from Unforgettable Croatia on THAT competition offer.
It was possibly the most anticipated event in television series history – the opening of Season 8 of the wildly popular HBO show, Game of Thrones.
All over the globe, major international brands teamed up with HBO to produce GoT-themed variations of their popular products. Brands such as Johnnie Walker.
One of the main locations for Game of Thrones, of course, is Croatia, and Dubrovnik. As a global marketing opportunity for Croatian tourism, this was hard to beat (well, perhaps last year’s World Cup in Russia, another gift for tourism promotion).
And one company not only saw the opportunity but took full advantage. There was only one story at the launch of Series 8 that people were talking about with regard to Croatia – the genius competition offered by UK-based Unforgettable Croatia, which promised a luxury 7-day holiday in Croatia for the lucky winner who correctly guessed the ending of the show.
The offer went viral, and it was EVERYWHERE in my Facebook feed and elsewhere. Just how viral I learned from Graham Chapman, co-founder of Unforgettable Croatia, who was kind enough to respond as follows to my query to the agency Facebook page:
The idea for our Unforgettable Croatia ‘Guess-the-Ending’ Competition came from our fantastic marketing and creative team. The competition was open from 14 April to 5 May, just before the final episode was aired. The reason we got so much great coverage was down to the creativity of the idea, the timely advantage of the final series and that we were willing to give a fantastic prize that was worth around $5k.The idea for our Unforgettable Croatia ‘Guess-the-Ending’ Competition came from our fantastic marketing and creative team. The competition was open from 14 April to 5 May, just before the final episode was aired. The reason we got so much great coverage was down to the creativity of the idea, the timely advantage of the final series and that we were willing to give a fantastic prize that was worth around $5k.
The result of this campaign has meant that we’ve been aired throughout US television including Fox News and NBC News. We’ve also been incredibly fortunate to have over 300 magazines and news outlets worldwide feature the story. The most prominent ones being Cosmopolitan, Condenast, the Independent, Elle Magazine, Travel & Leisure Magazine, Yahoo, MSN and Thrillist.
During the period in which we ran the competition, we had 98,200 unique visitors to our Game of Thrones competition page and 14,487 applications which was an incredible response. It’s taken us a bit of time to choose the winner due to the overwhelming response. We have chosen a winner and they have been notified, though we are just waiting for them to respond. We plan to share pictures of their trip on our social media channels once completed.
Croatia has been truly blessed to host so much of the Game of Thrones filming in Split and Dubrovnik. This and Croatia’s World Cup success has significantly raised the profile of Croatia, particularly in the US and Canada. I don’t think we can underestimate the number of visitors and revenue this hit series has brought to Croatia, especially Dubrovnik in recent years. I hope the Croatian Government does more to promote itself as a destination for future filming projects.
On a side note, as someone who brings in a long of visitors to Croatia every year, I’ve been following your articles on the difference between infrastructure investment and planning in Croatia versus Montenegro. I too find it incredibly frustrating the amount of red tape and everything else that still goes on. We are about to launch Unforgettable Greece and so I have been spending quite a bit of time visiting new hotel partners in Greece. It is simply staggering how far ahead Greece are compared to Croatia with the number and standard of 5-star hotels there. I would love to defend Croatia and insist that it is still an emerging country, but I fear this would be the same excuse 10 years from now and we will still be waiting for the Four Seasons in Hvar to open…..
A great return for $5k. By contrast, this massive global marketing opportunity was met with complete silence on the Facebook page of the Croatian National Tourist Board, something which I could not quite understand and have written about recently.
I contacted the Croatian National Tourist Board for an explanation as well as other questions related to using Game of Thrones to promote Croatia, a show which has been filming here since 2011. They were kind enough to answer and I am just waiting for clarification on certain points before writing a bigger piece on Croatia’s official approach to Game of Thrones tourism, but here is the explanation from the Croatian National Tourist Board as to why there was no promotion of the season opening:
Our strategy was to be more focused on the last episode since we were in the process of finalizing activities related. We have established cooperation with HBO Adria focused on the exclusive screening of Game of Thrones finale in Dubrovnik, which happened on May 20th. Cooperation also covers activities across 14 countries where HBO Europe operates (Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Portugal). In each of these countries Game of Thrones fans had the chance to compete and win an exclusive trip to Dubrovnik, including the attendance at the series finale screening.
I don’t have any details of the cost and effectiveness of the official campaign, but I will ask.
To learn more about Game of Thrones in Croatia, check out the Total Croatia guide.
