House of the Dragon: Season 3 Launch Campaign

The dragons are at the heart of this franchise and therefore heavily featured in the campaign. For Season 3, we wanted to bring together all of the elements to set the scene for the season— fire, smoke and of course the dragons. While BGSTR manages the dragon’s VFX, the creatures themselves are creations of Pixomondo, who has been designing the mythical creatures for HBO since the second season of Game of Thrones.

The BGSTR team has discovered a passion for creating impactful OOH campaigns and sunk their claws into HOTD, determined to create a stand out moment for fans in the wild. The digital out-of-home campaign for Season 3 built on the flexible, multi-ratio toolkit framework we've developed and refined across prior seasons. The result is a dynamic series of promotions that leap off the screen and into the audience’s reality, perfect for the larger-than-life scale of the series itself.

The MAX platform integration for Season 3 keeps the campaign present at the moment of highest viewer intent. A quick moment but designed to keep viewers engaged and focused on the heart of the series— the dragons.

We developed a flex dragon deliverable that pushed the versatility of our 3D dragon assets further than any prior season, giving HBO a modular library of elements — scalable, repositionable, ready for whatever the full promotional push required. Those elements became the foundation for the IPM library: visually engaging layovers designed to catch viewers mid-program and hold their attention, working hard in the margins of other programming to keep the Season 3 premiere top of mind.

The AV toolkit is one of the more quietly essential deliverables we produce for this campaign— a step-by-step guide for how to take the logo assets from After Effects into real-world applications, giving the HBO team the ability to manipulate and localize the toolkit themselves. For a campaign operating across 13+ international markets, that flexibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's what makes the whole system work.

We returned to The House That Dragons Built, the behind-the-scenes companion series that takes audiences inside the making of the show including logistics, the set design, and the special effects that make Westeros feel real. Designing the open for this docuseries is a different creative challenge than campaign work. The question is how to honor the craft of something without competing with it. We come back to the same answer every time. Premium design work centered around the dragons themselves.