Brief/objective
We needed to create awareness for the fourth season return of The Walking Dead on Foxtel’s FX channel. The mid-season return in February is perfectly timed for the northern hemisphere. But in Australia we’re thinking about the beach and cricket, not zombies. So we needed a campaign that would put The Walking Dead top of mind. The audience was both new and existing customers, but we identified and targeted key influencers with the aim of getting them to spread the message that The Walking Dead is back, and the first place to see it is on Foxtel’s FX channel.
Creative solution
With limited budget, our solution was a social media campaign that would be voluntarily talked about and shared. Everyone knows zombies like to follow people, so we created 8,000 zombie Twitter profiles and followed key influencers on Twitter. Our aim was to start a zombie outbreak that would get tweeted about. Once the outbreak was big enough and Twitter took notice, we revealed the outbreak was caused by the return of The Walking Dead. By creating something interesting and unexpected enough to tweet about, we could reach an audience that would grow exponentially with no extra media costs.
We took the premise of The Walking Dead (a group of people being followed by hordes of zombies) and brought that exact scenario into people’s everyday lives. Foxtel and FX are entertainment brands and programs like The Walking Dead are conversation starters. So our creative solution had to be engaging, surprising and entertaining. And it needed to get people talking.
Results
The campaign received a total of 1,803,885 impressions (1,583,657 Twitter and 220,228 Facebook) with an 88% positive sentiment (measured by Radian6). The hashtag #zombiefollowers trended in Sydney and the FX channel Twitter handle (@FXTVAU) trended in Australia. The campaign was tweeted about by a prominent politician, journalists, bloggers and even by our national broadcaster, the ABC. The fourth season return of The Walking Dead was the top-rating show of the night on subscription TV. All from a campaign that was live for less than 24 hours with a total budget under $18,000 AUD (< $16,000 production and <$2,000 media).