Small Council: Let’s talk about HBO’s marketing strategy for Game of Thrones Season 6

Game of Thrones Season 6 is debuting in less than two months, but HBO is playing its hand close to its chest. Outside of some lovely still photographs from the coming season, there’s not much to look over. The first teaser video remixed old footage, the “flag teasers” featured some new dialogue but no new footage, the Hall of Faces trailer focused on the show’s past, and the network is trying to avoid leaks by withholding advance episodes from the press. Is this overkill? How does this compare to previous marketing pushes? Is HBO’s determination not to reveal anything good for viewers? Bad? Irrelevant? The Small Council discusses.

DAN: It feels strange to be in March and not have a trailer for the new season of Game of Thrones yet. Apart from the still photo collection, the teases we’ve gotten for Season 6 have been very anemic, and I think it’s time to ask this question: is HBO holding stuff back on purpose?

Is this were any other show, I wouldn’t ask. What network wouldn’t want to build anticipation for its programming? Then again, this is the company that openly admitted to trolling fans with its hard-to-watch promos for Season 5 (“Honestly, we wanted everyone to feel just a little bit violated,” a representative said at the time. “Man, people were pissed.), so I can believe that the producers are being purposefully cagey. And luckily for them, Game of Thrones is popular enough so they can get away with it.

And then came the news that HBO wouldn’t be sending advance copies of episodes to the press. There are two reasons a TV or movie studio might do this: 1) The material is terrible, or; 2) The movie or TV show is so popular that the studio doesn’t need critics to build hype. Season 5 wasn’t as well-received as past seasons (the show’s record 12 Emmy wins notwithstanding), but I can’t believe that Season 6 is so bad it had to be kept away from critics. I think we’re dealing with option #2 here.

And also, HBO doesn’t want the episodes leaking onto the internet ahead of the premiere. That problem may be a little more unique to this situation.

But just how determined is HBO to keep information on lockdown? Might this mean that—horror of horrors—there will be no trailer? I think there will—as popular as Game of Thrones is, a trailer would get the show into the news cycle for weeks, and that’s attention the network would be silly to ignore. Until then, maybe this slow burn marketing strategy is good for everybody. We fans can stew about the lack of advance press all we want, but it’ll just make it all the sweeter when April 24 rolls around.

KATIE: After the Season 5 leak, I for one didn’t think HBO would be chomping at the bit to let their baby go out alone into the world again. Withholding a trailer, though… that’s a whole other ball game. As much as I want a taste of what’s in store for Season 6, I wouldn’t be surprised if a trailer never dropped. As many have pointed out, Game of Thrones doesn’t need any help hyping itself up–this franchise is a beast, and it does what it wants, almost like it’s an entity all on its own.

If I’m honest, though, I’d like to see the trailer give us something to talk about other than Jon Snow: Dead or Alive? True, fans have found plenty else to discuss, but it always comes back to what’s going down at the Wall besides Jon’s limp, multiple-stab-wounds body. The still photos raised their own questions, but the trailer would certainly have more meat to it, and we could use it to tide us over until our calendars hit that fateful Sunday.

Whether or not we get it, the fact remains that we’re all talking about Game of Thrones, anyway, sneak peek notwithstanding.

RAZOR: What could be a bigger tease than showing Cersei’s smirking face, literally in the face of thousands of angry fans screaming “THIS IS ALL WE GET?” At first I was nonplussed at the Hall of Faces tour, I mean, once you’ve seen one Hall of Faces, you seen em all, am I right? But, when they started to focus in on Ned, and then Robb, I began to watch in hushed reverence…and then when Catelyn Stark’s face was shown, and her voice intoned a need for vengeance, well, let’s just say I knew for a fact that Lady Stoneheart was going to be in Season 6…Oh gods, I need help.

All in all I’m fine with the marketing for Game of Thrones Season 6. It’s smart, it hasn’t given away too much, and it’s just enough to keep us on the hook for more. And, with very little to no guidelines from the books to go on, I like not knowing what’s coming next. And, when you start to complain too much, just remember, the HBO marketing department could always go back to those dammed Raved Sends the Sight tweets. Now pardon me as I vomit into my own mouth for even thinking of that.

ANI: I find marketing and the promotion for certain shows to be just as fascinating as the programs themselves. Oftentimes it is remarkable how a movie or TV show is edited to appeal to certain demographics when it comes to trailers and campaigns. (Think back to the Muppets this past summer. The fact that the show was going to have problems was evident in the marketing campaign which couldn’t decide if they wanted to market it as a television program that was “the return of the Muppets to TV” or a faux reality show where we all pretended the Muppets, and Miss Piggy’s Late Night program, were real things.)

But it’s one thing to edit marketing to appeal to certain segments, like Ex Machina, which was trailered to be stereotypical scifi mixed with romance, and turned out to be a feminist manifesto that got nominated for Oscars. It’s another to blast audiences in the face with “this is exactly the movie you think it is, now with even more superheroes!” like they do with The Avengers. But to not trailer at all? To literally refuse to release anything in a trailer, lest it spoiler a hair of the coming product? Even Star Wars didn’t do that. (Much as J.J. Abrams would have preferred them to.) To do that takes a real nerve, not to mention a confidence in your audience that they will show up on the appointed time and date with no other information, that very few in the media world actually can say they have in their product. This is Beyoncé dropping her album at 12midnight on a Friday levels of confidence in your audience and your product.

And the truly ironic part of all this is that, for those who follow the spoilers, is that there is SO MUCH this coming season for them to boast about. They have a battle that took twice as long to film as Hardhome last season. Arya’s story line in Braavos has some remarkable shots we saw during filming. There are gorgeous new locations all around Spain that the production used to stand in for new parts of Westeros we’ve never visited before, some of which are going to put the Alcazar of Seville (where Dorne was done last season) to shame. There are high level British actors who will appear this season for the first time, including Ian McShane, Richard E Grant and James Faulkner. The show literally gave HBO boatloads to market the season with.

And HBO hasn’t done a damn thing with it. Is that the channel’s choice? The production’s choice? Or a consensus agreement between the two? All we can be sure of is that it is due to one tiny little detail that they’re just praying, if they keep refusing to reveal anything, will somehow magically not reach the general popular consciousness in the next 50 days.

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