Winter is coming. (For brand advertisers)

The fifth season of Game of Thrones premiers on April 13th, and every fan has had their calendars marked for months. Many brands active on social media will attempt to participate in the social conversations that will happen around this highly anticipated event. The hope is that any smart or funny tweets will go viral and generate millions of free impressions for the brand, regardless of whether the brand has any legitimate association with the show or not. I can see it now...

What will the Mountain Dew this season? (See what I did there?) #Finally #GOT
- @MountainDew

We think every night should be about Games. #GOT
- @HasbroGamesNight

I don't know why everybody is so eager to sit on the Iron Throne. It sounds uncomfortable. #PreferPorcelain #GOT
- @Charmin

We can debate whether a brand should try to interject itself into conversations in which they have no direct relevance. But this post is about the fact that "regular TV" makes it easy for brands to participate in major TV events if they choose to do so, because they can time their real-time tweets with people watching in real-time. Pirates and PVR-lovers aside, everybody will watch the Superbowl, the Academy Awards, and the premier of Game of Thrones together.

Unfortunately, this thinking doesn't work with most Netflix-Original shows.

"Orange has always been great..."

When Netflix released the second season of Orange is the New Black on June 6, 2014, I was managing the Simply Orange brand in Canada. Because we had a social presence on Twitter, our digital agency proposed a series of tweets that would tie in to the launch of the new season.

The rationale was fairly simple: the show was very popular, "Orange" would be trending on social media that day, and we could benefit if we were able to get in on those conversations. (After all, we were a fairly sizable orange juice brand, and thus felt like using #Orange wouldn't be inappropriate.) 

We immediately recognized the timing challenge that Netflix had introduced: how would we be able to time content-specific tweets when people will be watching the content at different times?

But I love to "test and learn", and I really love a challenge. It was on-strategy (due to the number of users we could gain if we were successful), it was a fun idea, and there were no incremental costs involved, so I decided to approve the initiative and see if we could figure it out.

It didn't work.

There were a few reasons why, but none of them had to do with our superb digital agency. (I think a few of them had to do with our uber-risk-adverse corporate culture, but I'll leave it at that.)

The biggest challenge, of course, was the one we had identified right at the start: if we didn't know when people would be seeing what, we couldn't time our content appropriately. The followers that "got it" were the ones that had also been eagerly anticipating the show and binge-watched the season quickly: they thought our tweets were witty and on-point. But the majority of our followers were confused, and didn't understand what we were talking about until after we had sent out a few tweets. And by that time, it was too late: we were irrelevant. 

Netflix has changed the game.

Marvel's Daredevil makes its début on Netflix today, and I suspect it will be well-received; not only does Netflix have a pretty impressive track record with its original productions, but superhero-themed television shows have worked well recently. (After launching this past Fall, both Gotham and The Flash quickly became two of Canada's top-watched shows.) 

But marketers who may want to interject their brands into the Daredevil conversation will have same problem I had with Orange is the New Black: Netflix released all 12 episodes from the first season of Marvel's Daredevil at the same time. (Sorry @DirtDevil, you might be out of luck.)

Winter is coming. (For brand advertisers)

A Nielsen study recently reported that Netflix is in 36% of American households. That number is only going to get bigger. Which means marketers are going to need to address a few issues, fast:

1. How does a brand advertise on a platform that doesn't have any advertising?
2. How does a brand participate in a conversation that's happening with different people at different times?
3. How does a brand get noticed when its target audience is busy paying attention to something else?

Okay, that last question has always been the primary challenge for marketers. But the task just got much, much more difficult.