You know a really good marketing/PR idea when you see one… There’s always that slight pang of envy and the “I wish I thought of that” feeling in the pit of your stomach.

Along with a healthy dose of admiration, I recently experienced these feelings when I heard about the simple, yet brilliant, idea that AMC and Fox International Channels were planning for the launch of their new zombie TV series “The Walking Dead.” Whether you’re a zombie fan or not, you have to give the folks at AMC and Fox a lot of credit for launching a show that, on paper, wasn’t the surest bet.

The shows’ Halloween premiere was preceded the week before by a series of perfectly orchestrated “zombie attacks” in 26 cities across the globe. Starting at daybreak in Taipei and Hong Kong, hundreds of extras in zombie makeup began roaming landmarks in major cities across the globe, with all of the “attacks” taking place during a 24-hour period. After the first attacks, the market-by-market news started to appear in social and traditional media, making the story a Yahoo! trending topic by the time zombies crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.

Wisely leveraging the zombie content, the AMC/Fox marketing team used the show’s Facebook page to post zombie attack photos and videos from each city as they were happening around the world. Both the media and consumers kept Twitter buzzing about “The Walking Dead” for days. It truly turned into a media and pop culture take-over that was nothing short of the hype and hysteria Orson Welles conjured during his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

As a result of all the hype (and good reviews), the series premiered to record cable ratings – AMC renewed the series for the season after just two episodes. It’s a great show that would have attracted loyal fans of the comic books, but the marketing team managed to get a huge new audience, along with the built-in fan base.

--Mark Malinowski, Vice President

Comments

Eddie

November 27, 2010 10:48 AM I love this post...What a reminder that good ideas are still alive and well, we just have to find them.

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