How to survive the Zombie Apocalypse
I love a good April Fools day joke. I was a part of a number of them at TSN (my recurring “Sid Drake” character was continually making appearances in the WWF in the late 90’s), and I’ve pulled a couple of doozies on my own websites over the years (including last year’s), but for this year a bunch of us at work came up with something genius.
It’s a little bit of a tradition in tech. Google’s been doing April Fool’s day jokes for years. ThinkGeek’s joke products become so popular that they get made for real (such as last year’s Star Wars Tantaun Sleeping Bag).
I built a little team(Craig, Rahul, Matt, Will and James), and we set out to do something hilarious. We decided to send out a research report on how to survive an infectious outbreak. We knew we’d need executive support to send it to the whole client base, so we shot it, edited it, and I created a fake distribution and landing page…and then showed it to Joel, the CEO. He loved it, bounced it off one other exec, and gave us the green light.
Our thought was, first off…this is funny, and our core audience are tech guys, they’ll get a kick out of it. Second, the title was so provocative (How to Survive the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse) that this will get huge click through traffic on our emails, and we’ve got enough new stuff on the site, that people will probably hit a few links. Finally, if we posted this to You Tube with the content and the quality of it, there’s a good chance it will get a bunch of hits.
I’ll update this page with how it performs, but right now, I’m thinking this is one of my favourite things I’ve done in a while.
Here it is for your viewing pleasure.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szLdGUscdAI