AMC's The Walking Dead was in mid-season hiatus and AMC wanted to drive anticipation and viewership for the February 2013 mid-season return of the show. It needed to go beyond the show's rabid fan base and reach new potential viewers on a tight budget of $50,000.
To make the most impact with little money, the agency set to create an innovative experiential event that could gain high sharing in social media through fans and reach people who hadn't yet watched the show.
The starting point was to identify a common behaviour in events worth anticipating: the countdown. A pop-up experience around a countdown would give the show's social community content on a daily basis, and extend the reach with tweets, retweets, shares and original posts. For a pop-up to achieve high viral sharing, the essence of the idea had to be simple: it had to be easy to describe in tweet or a blogger headline.
A countdown was created in an unmistakably Walking Dead way: The Rotting Finger Countdown. It was a massive installation of eight-foot-tall zombie hands providing a "can't miss" spectacle at Union Station, where more than 200,000 people pass through every day. Each day, a zombie finger was broken off, counting down to the show. Each rotting two-foot-long zombie finger then helped drive even more sharing: fans who tweeted a picture of themselves at the installation with the #TWDFeb10 hashtag could win a finger.
The presence of "live" zombies added impact to the launch, which was leveraged to attract Toronto-based media in broadcast and print, and photos from the launch day drove blogger outreach. After one day, the Rotting Finger Countdown became a global phenomenon covered by 60 international blogs.
Over the course of five days, the Rotting Finger Countdown generated over 18 million Twitter impressions, 900,000 impressions in Toronto's biggest traditional publications that covered the event, 3.2 million impressions in blogs and online pubs, and gained 11,000 new Canadian Facebook fans. A $50,000 budget was turned into $500,000 in AEV media value. Most importantly, the mid-reason return of The Walking Dead generated the highest viewership numbers of the show's history, and a new record high for AMC.