Was The Starbucks Cup In Game Of Thrones A Mistake?---Or Brilliant Viral Marketing

Who knew a coffee cup would be a huge explosion of conversation on the internet. In the popular show Game Of Thrones, a two second visual of a simple coffee cup sparked viral memes and commotion on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and pretty much every media outlet gave their 2 cents. A simple mistake of leaving a modern-day coffee cup in a universe where it features swords,magic and dragons are absolutely ridiculous. But the ridiculousness of this could be a simple mistake or viral marketing that brought millions of dollars in awareness to a show and a coffee brand.

So was this “mistake” a simple error. Or could this be a new way to tap into the benefits of viral marketing? With digital ads bombarding people on a daily basis from radio to social media to google ads. People are getting numb to ads they are getting harder and harder to grab attention from people so when something that sparks a discussion comes outs of nowhere such as this cup. That sparks memes, conversations, and discussion on an already massively popular show.

Anything that invokes a strong emotion whether it be anger, happiness, humor. It tends to get shared more! So something such as this simple cup placement is so funny because of its odd placement and environment it brought a huge amount of attention. So this strategy will likely be seen more and more in the future.

The funny thing is the coffee wasn’t even a Starbucks cup. Good branding is king! But we will never know if this was done on purpose or by accident but what we can learn from it is that there are more unique ways to grab attention then just advertisements. A little food for thought.