HBO spending over $100 million to market House of the Dragon

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https://deadline.com/2022/08/house-o...gn-1235096571/

EXCLUSIVE: For all the noise about David Zaslav’s quest to find $3 billion in cost-saving initiatives at the newly merged Warner Bros Discovery, what remains important to the new CEO is to spend on content where those dollars pay off.

And where is that? Why, on the launch of HBO’s near $200M Game of Thrones spinoff series, House of the Dragon, premiering this Sunday on both the linear pay-TV channel and streaming service HBO Max. Sources inform Deadline that HBO’s biggest marketing campaign ever is valued at over $100M in media spend (that’s a combo of ad spot value and hard cash shelled out). That’s a theatrical tentpole-sized marketing budget by all accounts, not some thrifty, Netflix-type push to subscribers on its menu. And as Zaslav pointed out today in his congratulatory memo to staffers (obtained by Deadline) before House of the Dragon‘s debut, it’s already paid off with the series campaign having “reached nearly 130 million people in the US alone,” while also repping a united front across a majority of brands in the Warner Bros Discovery empire to tubthump this new show.