My friend Benjamin Nelson, Creative Director at Headstand Media just posted a great site review of the Sears Zombie website. It is quite refreshing to see a mature Brand like Sears take some risk and have some fun with the zombie craze sweeping the traditional media channels. Be sure and check out the videos on the site, they are really quite humorous.
Thanks for the mention Steve. Yea, it’s encouraging to see companies like Sears take risks. I’m curious if this was an internal driven effort, or if an agency they work with pitched it to them and executed it.
The breadth of content and attention to detail leads me to believe that it was probably an agency pitch and executed. I spent some time searching around the web to see if an agency was involved but came up empty. One blog comment mentioned that the “Zombie Elevator” video was shot by internal web team. Still to be commended for the willingness to have fun with their brand and not take themselves too seriously. I hope the management team will value the effort and understand that the immediate impact of something like this is not immediate increase in sales (although that would be nice) but connecting their Brand to current culture and making them more relevant to a younger audience who may see Sears as a place to only look at appliances or tools.
This blog post gives some insight into how the campaign was formed. Looks like it came from internal discussions at Sears, but I”m not clear who executed it. http://www.ragan.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=5AA50C55146B4C8C98F903986BC02C56&tier=4&id=EC022D90EDAC43BE84C065800FBC8337&AudID=3FF14703FD8C4AE98B9B4365B978201A