Sheer genius! In a recent publicity stunt the CDC (Center for Disease Control) garnered national attention by Tweeting about its zombie readiness protocol. This Social Media madness was designed to focus attention on disaster preparedness. In this case the disaster was an onslaught of the un-dead.
Disaster preparedness kits are something that we all know we should have, but few of us do. Not exactly sexy or interesting to most of us. Zombies on the other hand… well, I personally find them interesting (excluding my staff on a Monday morning).
The angle was to instruct you on what you need to do before a zombie invasion and before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp. And by the way… these instructions are also good for natural disasters as well.
The irony of great marketing? Well it worked so well that all the additional traffic crashed their servers. I guess they weren’t that prepared after all.
-Chuck Bankoff