In the age of the internet, the adage “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is more relevant than ever before. We got to see this happen in real time as Game of Thrones managed to leave a Starbucks cup in the shot in Season 8 episode 4, “The Last of the Starks“. It has now been estimated that this little goof got Starbucks a whopping $2.3 billion in free advertising, and the cup didn’t even actually belong to Starbucks! Read on.
Game of Thrones aired the episode on Sunday, and pretty soon the fans noticed the cup, and the goof went viral. Becoming an instant meme, it was addressed with humour by Starbucks and HBO, both. An executive producer on the show, Bernie Caulfield, even apologized for the goof and joked that Starbucks should give them money. The cup was actually from the show’s craft services. HBO was quick to edit it out, but all the buzz had already been created.
CEO of marketing company Hollywood Branded, Stacy Jones, estimated that the whole buzz got Starbucks a free advertisement jackpot worth $2.3 billion, judging by the 10627 mentions of this incident online, as well as on TV and Radio, according to data by Critical Mention. She said:
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime collision of opportunity for Starbucks. 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.”
Another analytics firm, Talkwalker, also charted 193,000 mentions of the goof within 48 hours of the episode airing. In either case, Starbucks walked out of this looking pretty slick. What do you guys think? Talk to us in the comments, down below!
