English Entertainment
Star World launches Game of Thrones season 7 with personalized posters
MUMBAI: The great war is finally upon Westeros as the much anticipated first episode of Game of Thrones premiered on Star World last Tuesday at 11 PM. In order to promote the launch, Star World undertook a mammoth digital campaign to engage with fans. By tapping into current trends on social media and capitalizing on three focal crowd-pullers: selfies, user-generated content and customization, the brand opened doors to the Game of Thrones universe for Twitterati fans of the series.
Undertaking a real time digital activity, Star World invited fans on Twitter to send in a selfie with the hashtag: #GOT7onSW which they then transformed into a personalized Game of Thrones season 7 campaign poster.
The channel went on to receive a response that not only re-affirmed the cult status of the show but also love for the brand. Star World India trended worldwide and #GOTS7onSW trended in India for 11 hours with Star World receiving over 25,000 tweets. The fervor, however, didn’t stop as the activity garnered an estimated 161 million impressions with over 3000 personalized posters being rolled out on a real time basis. Influencers like Aashka Goradia, Atul Khatri, Madan Chikna and Pakchikpak Raja Babu got their own personalized posters. Star World also engaged with birthday girl Priyanka Chopra by tweeting out birthday wishes to her through the personalized poster. Indian media, too, supported the initiative with complete enthusiasm.
Star World truly engaged with fans in a unique manner by giving them a chance to be a part of the Game of Thrones universe thereby creating new marketing benchmarks for the show.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
