SOCIAL CAMPAIGN
WEBBY submission
Where’s rick?!
This is the rallying cry that we saw in the comments on every single social post after series lead Andrew Lincoln decided to depart The Walking Dead in 2018. It was unrelenting.
Over five years later, Rick and fan favorite Michonne were finally set to return in their very own spin-off. The hype was unprecedented and we knew that we needed to create a social campaign that would rise to the occasion.
The results were overwhelming.
this is the ones who live.
RICK & MICHONNE ARE BACK
So, where to start? Early on, the show’s executive producers communicated that they didn’t want to reveal much about the story or even where the characters were before the premiere. They wanted fans to experience all the twists and turns as they unfolded. While this normally may have been a challenge for our social marketing team, we decided to embrace it.
In late 2023, we rolled out a series of mysterious teases that offered up just the tiniest crumb of new information and the fans went WILD. Platforms like Reddit and X lit up with fan theories and speculation.
COMBINED ORGANIC VIEWS (IG)
8.1M
We continued on with social assets designed to build upon the hype that had been happening organically for years. Our social handles finally acknowledged the “Where’s Rick?” mantra and we used it to our advantage to build anticipation.
By the second week of January, we had brought the suspense to a fever-pitch. The fans were expecting their first glimpses of Rick and Michonne and each day that passed without a trailer was a disappointment. The day before the trailer drop, we released a TWD Duet video, asking our followers to engage with a classic Rick scene, that saw an enormous return for us and primed the account for the next day. Finally, we made sure our fans knew we were hearing them with this teaser that went out a few hours before the trailer.
ORGANIC VIEWS (IG)
1.5M
ORGANIC VIEWS (TikTok)
945K
The result was one of the best performing trailer releases in AMC history. (Even reaction videos TO the trailer outperformed expectations!)
38M
COMBINED VIEWS (ALL SOCIAL)
We already had a lot of people seated and ready for The Ones Who Live, but there were still a huge number of potential viewers that had fallen off The Walking Dead since it smashed television records with a whopping 17 million same-day viewers a decade ago.
To go after lapsed viewers, we spent a good amount of our pre-premiere period honoring the storied legacy that led to this new chapter. We played up nostalgia and teased the epic conclusion of the Rick and Michonne saga that began in 2010.
NOW LET’s bring the fans back
1.5M
ORGANIC VIEWS (IG)
2.4M
ORGANIC VIEWS (IG)
VALENTINE’s day is dead
Love is a central theme in The Ones Who Live and we knew we wanted to do a huge stunt for Valentine’s Day, which fell just two weeks before our series premiere. Fans were dying to see the reunion between Rick and Michonne and we wanted that to reach a fever pitch over the course of the day.
The highlight was a jaw-dropping ad display on the Las Vegas Sphere, courtesy of our Design and Marketing teams. It was an incredible sight to behold in person, but our goal on social media was to extend the experience beyond Vegas and drive awareness to the millions of TWD fans around the globe. We created the below video, which garnered over 1.8M views on TikTok alone, within 24 hours.
We also seeded out fun Valentine’s Day-centric content throughout the day, including a recap of the entire Rick and Michonne love story and highly shareable Valentine’s Day cards.
working with the cast
Andrew Lincoln, Danai Gurira, and the rest of the TOWL cast were incredible partners when it came to capturing social content. Scheduling was incredibly tight, but we made the most of the opportunities that were available.
During our social marketing shoot, we ditched the typical green screen set-up in favor of an epic, practical red haze set. Our heroes, in character, would emerge out of the smoke and reveal themselves suited up and in action for the first time in years. We utilized this awesome footage in our paid campaign especially, emphatically declaring that Rick and Michonne were back.
VIDEO VIEWS (IG)
1.3M
Our incredible AMC Events & Experiences team also put on a star-studded red carpet premiere in Los Angeles. It was a lot of fun in person, but we also wanted to give our loyal followers an experience that was nearly as good as being there. Throughout the night, we asked our followers on Instagram Stories which questions they wanted to see their favorite TWD actors answer and then we played messenger and asked for them! The result was an interactive experience that kept fans playing along well into the night on the West Coast.
Once we reached premiere week, our work was just beginning. We wanted to create in-season content that would keep fans engaged and talking about TOWL week after week. The goal was to be reactive - quick enough on our feet to recognize what people were talking about after each episode and join the conversation. “To fans by fans” is always our motto with content creation.
IN-SEASON CONTENT
and that’s how it ends!
(FOR NOW?)
We’re extremely proud of the social campaign that we created in support of The Ones Who Live and the metrics back it up too. Some of our social accounts, despite being massive already, still saw huge spikes in new followers during the campaign window. We believe a lot of these new followers were those aforementioned lapsed viewers, who may have stopped watching the show before our TikTok and Instagram accounts were even created.
In particular, we managed to grow our TikTok account tremendously before premiere, gaining over 112,000 new followers in a single week.
+236K
NEW TIKTOK FOLLOWERS
+90K
NEW YOUTUBE SUBSCRIBERS
+22K
NEW INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS
And of course, it didn’t hurt that the show was a massive cable television hit as well!
There wasn’t much time to celebrate though, because just around the corner was our next big challenge…