Webby Nominated
Platform for AMC sweepstakes
Funnel to brand social channels
Garnered over 90 prominent features
With Millions of App installs and tens of millions of branded content shares, Dead Yourself became a huge viral marketing channel for The Walking Dead. I designed and managed the development of unique, custom technology to deliver exceptional “Walker” transformations and effects that fans of TWD would truly love… and share.
Team
Product Manager
Illustrator
Front end engineer
Technical Artist
Responsibilities
Project Pitching
Contract Negotiation
App Rebranding
Product Management
UI Design
UX
Delivering Fan Service
Our core Product imperative was that people who love The Walking Dead should love this App. We focused on making everything from infamous weapons like “Lucille” and Michonne’s katana to timely/topical Walker variations like the bloated “Water Walker” and “Sand Walkers” available for fans to use in their creations.
Extreme Effect Customization
Fans wanted to be able to configure their ideal Walker transformation and we wanted them to feel like each creation was uniquely theirs. We designed a system to support over 2200 seamless “Walker” Eye, Mouth, and “Prop” combinations, while maintaining a simple, intuitive interface for effect selection and editing.
Fantastic Sound & Animation
Bringing the “Walkers” that people created to “life” with extraordinary animations truly drives home the “surprise and delight” of the transformation. Almost as important as the visual style, the sound and motion is crucial to what makes Walkers their own particular brand of zombie. Working closely with AMC we broke down how “Walkers” breath, bite and blink(ie. they don’t!) to deliver effects that are extremely faithful to the show.
Branded Content Sharing
People organically sharing huge images of the TWD logo to their social graph has been a massive source of brand visibility. The app drove millions of branded content shares that have garnered hundreds of millions of brand impressions.
Performant Affiliate Rewards
Becoming a Walker is great, but spreading the virus is even better.
To drive growth, I designed an affiliate system that naturally mapped onto peoples concept of a spreading zombie virus.
A huge percentage of users were refereed through affiliate links.
Custom Technologies
Adding weapons and other props proved wildly popular, but we initially implemented them with fixed positions relative to people’s faces.
People wanted to move them and adding this feature also increased potential for customization.
Using familiar pinch and drag gestures, we developed a simple, intuitive interaction model for manipulating 2D objects within a semi-3D environment.
