You probably heard about that time a dragon was on the Empire State Building.
This is the story behind that story. The media thinking that generated 7.8 billion impressions, a 59% lift in awareness, 29% increase in intent to watch, and the biggest premiere in HBO Max history.
All without spending a dollar on traditional paid media placements.
The Unwinnable Media Math Problem
Rising media costs.
Declining organic reach.
Audiences increasingly numb to hyper-targeted messaging.
The math that used to work for brand marketers doesn't work anymore.
Most brands respond by buying more inventory, optimizing frequency, and hoping algorithmic distribution does the rest. This creates what media practitioners recognize as an unwinnable math problem: you're fighting for attention in the same overcrowded spaces as everyone else.
HBO's "House of the Dragon" Season 2 faced this exact challenge after a two-year hiatus, needing to re-establish cultural relevance while competing against hundreds of other premiere launches.
It's also what Corbin Brown, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Giant Spoon, learned through rigorous testing. "When people were exposed to both traditional and expansive campaign elements... those people had lifts that were massive."
The data doesn't lie: The most effective media plans consider the assets that aren't for sale alongside the inventory that is.
Context Amplifies Content
Instead of optimizing reach and frequency across broad audiences, Giant Spoon concentrated resources on creating unmissable moments within specific markets. This wasn't about choosing between traditional and innovative tactics, but understanding how they amplify each other when strategically combined.
The breakthrough came from studying audience exposure patterns. Brown’s team partnered with Lab42 Research to conduct an in-depth, post-campaign analysis, measuring how different exposure combinations affected audience behavior. People who experienced both standard promotional elements (trailers, traditional ads) and unexpected expansive elements (CGI banners, dragon installations) showed dramatically higher engagement than those exposed to either approach alone.
The data led to a fundamental truth: Familiar formats plus breathtaking experiences create a multiplier effect. This makes traditional advertising work harder.
"The calculated risk that we all took was, 'Hey, if we do something that is going to spark conversation, it's going to be more valuable.'"
Brown's team learned what happens when you stop thinking like everyone else: you can turn your marketing into conversations people actually want to have.
Most entertainment marketing typically overlooks the places in daily life. We see that cities work as more than ad spaces—they're living ecosystems where brands can become part of the conversation rather than interrupting it.
Instead of buying regular billboard spots, Giant Spoon built a network of 50+ custom placements using spaces that weren't for sale. Major landmarks included the front entrance of Citi Field, the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Rockefeller Center, and Grand Central Terminal. Local businesses picked sides: Leon's Bagels, John's of Bleecker, Mile End Delicatessen, and The Flower Shop went Team Green, while Murray's Bagels, Roberta's, Gray's Papaya, and Ray's chose Team Black.
This two-level approach created massive reach without feeling overwhelming. Big institutions gave the campaign scale and respect, while neighborhood spots created personal connection and surprise. The mix made the campaign feel huge and intimate at the same time—and drove real business results for participating local businesses, with many seeing 50%+ sales jumps during the campaign.
"Thinking expansively, behaving expansively, and breaking the rules and conventions of marketing, advertising, and brand behavior are a shortcut to growth,” Brown says.
The media work took months of one-on-one partnership talks. Each placement had to be set up as a cultural partnership rather than bought as ad space. It was time-intensive work that became the campaign's biggest advantage.
How to Buy What's Not For Sale
1. Lead with a big idea, not a budget
Most campaigns start with format-specific executions—a trailer, a poster, a social campaign. This limits scalability and coherence across touchpoints. We invert the process, beginning with an idea that can live in any — or an unlimited number of — form factors.
For “House of the Dragon,” the platform was elegantly simple. "The creative idea was to use color and to use the landscape of a city to get very recognizable characters, so to speak, to choose a side."
The genius wasn't in the complexity but in the platform's infinite adaptability. Team Black versus Team Green could translate to any medium, any market, any partner.
2. Think of every placement like a partnership
Cities function on two distinct levels: major institutions and neighborhood touchpoints.
"The characters of New York City are these massive institutions that everyone is familiar with,” the CSO adds, adding that these local institutions are meaningful within a neighborhood despite not being well-known city-wide. “We thought both were equally important."
This dual-layer activation created omnipresence without ubiquity. Major landmarks (Empire State Building, New York Stock Exchange) provided scale and legitimacy, while local businesses (Murray's Bagels, neighborhood spots) created intimacy and discovery. The combination made the campaign feel simultaneously massive and personal.
"We weren't buying ad space—we had to approach and broker one-of-a-kind partnerships and agreements with all those cultural institutions."
Although labor-intensive, this process became the campaign's competitive advantage. You can't programmatically buy the Empire State Building's participation in your marketing campaign.
3. Layer Reality and Fiction
The most sophisticated element of Giant Spoon's approach was the deliberate blending of CGI and physical implementations.
This strategy maximized visual impact while managing budget constraints, created audience debates about authenticity, and extended the campaign's reach beyond physical limitations. When audiences questioned whether the dragons on the Empire State Building were physically hung or digitally added with CGI, they became active participants in the campaign narrative.
In an era where AI-generated content saturates social feeds, uncertainty between real and constructed becomes engagement fuel. The campaign weaponized this ambiguity, creating content that demanded investigation and discussion.
4. Momentum and Sequencing Matters More Than Ad Flight
Brown’s team approached timing with the same precision co-founder Trevor Guthrie describes in media orchestration—understanding that the most effective campaigns require human conductors who can coordinate multiple elements for maximum impact. "The moments of silence in a song are just as important as the crescendo and the beat drop."
The months-long campaign built to a crescendo during premiere week, when all the partnership pieces came together for maximum impact. This created unavoidable cultural density—a moment when not participating in the conversation meant missing the zeitgeist entirely.
The orchestrated timing meant that when premiere week arrived, all the groundwork paid off. Like a conductor bringing together different instruments, each partnership hit its peak moment when the show launched.
The Mathematics of Earned Attention
The “House of the Dragon” campaign achieved what most marketers consider impossible: massive scale without massive paid media investment.
The 100% earned campaign generated:
- 7.8 billion impressions
- 495+ global press mentions
- 626% increase in social conversation week-over-week.
- 59% in awareness lift at the level of Super Bowl advertising
When you own the entire media process, earned attention becomes more powerful than purchased reach.
Content saturation now has a cure: stop optimizing for more, start optimizing for memorable.
For marketers managing eight-figure media investments, this offers sustainable leverage in an increasingly commoditized industry. The media strategy is proven, the results are measurable, and the competitive window remains wide open.
The dragon got the attention, but it was the media thinking that delivered the results.