April was a crazy month in the history of modern Pop-culture. First, it was Marvel’s Record-Shattering Avengers: EndGame which has broken all the box-office records worldwide. The second was the final season of Epic-saga Game of Thrones. If April was Crazy, May couldn’t have started on a crazier note.
The craze and commercial success of both these cinematic gems have such an impact on the audience that they don’t miss any detail in any frame of the show.
On “Game of Thrones” which is watched by over a billion people worldwide, even a second of advertisement is HUGE and can cost a brand millions of dollars. The same happened with Seattle based Starbucks, except for the fact that Starbucks didn’t pay for it.
All of it came, Absolutely FREE!
In the episode titled, ‘The Last of the Starks,’ which aired on Monday – 6:30 am IST in India, a coffee cup was clearly visible on a table in front of Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke, just before the 17:40 mark. The conspicuously out-of-place cup, which can be seen for about two seconds, was spotted by ‘GoT’ fans shortly after the episode aired.
Within a couple of days of airing, That coffee cup has generated an estimated $2.3billion worth of free advertising for Starbucks – even though it didn’t belong to the brand. The cup wasn’t even a Starbucks brand beverage, but people thought it was and stormed social media with jokes about the mistake on the set of the HBO hit show.
Image Source – theverge
The cup that showed up in the first airing of season eight’s episode four of GoT was actually a plain cup from the on-site food service referred to as craft services, CNBC reported. However, fans assuming it was a Starbucks drink was one of the top 10 trending topics on social media.
The coffee cup was apparently later edited out for streaming versions, but even as the series draws to a close, the memes will live on the internet forever.
Twitter was trending with the hashtag ‘#Starkbucks‘ an expression of the unexpected blending of House Stark and the Starbucks.
The world’s biggest coffee chain had its own take on the unexpected publicity in a series that is watched by more than 30 million people in the United States alone.
All of the talks was worth billions according to marketing CEO Stacy Jones. ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime collision of opportunity for Starbucks,’ Jones said. ‘But really, this is just the tip of the iceberg, because what isn’t being monitored or estimated is the word of mouth and social media on top of this.’
Social media mentions for Starbucks and ‘Game of Thrones,’ or some variation of a reference to the series, monitored by analytics company Talkwalker numbered in six-digit figures. Within 48 hours of the show’s airing the topic had been mentioned 193,000 times on Twitter, in online forums, blogs and on news websites.
