We got fans dead excited about season 8 of The Walking Dead on NOW TV by bringing the world of walkers and grime music together. We worked with some of the biggest names in grime music to create an authentic grime track that would resonate with both grime and TWD fans.

Enlisting help from a mega-fan MC, Bugzy Malone, we used our web-savvy audience’s favourite genre of music, grime, to deliver our NOW TV streaming message.

We knew that grime music was what excited our target audience and so we reworked the Walking Dead's iconic soundtrack, familiar to any fans of the show, and gave it a grime two-step beat that would appeal fans of grime.

On top of our reworking of the Walking Dead’s iconic soundtrack, Bugzy recorded lyrics celebrating the show’s most memorable characters and plot lines to drive fans to stream the show on NOW TV.

Instead of approaching our campaign like a TV launch show, we approached it like we were launching a chart hit...

1. Find a top record producer – to make the track authentic we worked with producer Swifta Beater to give TWD’s theme a fresh grime sound

2. Work with an artist that everyone is talking about – we recruited grime MC and megafan Bugzy Malone to spit bars

3. Film an awesome music video – we created a slick music video for the track that was as authentic to both grime fans and TWD fans

4. Create buzz – we secured blanket national coverage in traditional media and on social, our video was viewed over 2 million times in just one week

5. Get your track on the radio – Within hours the track was getting multiple plays on national radio and was added to BBC Radio 1Xtra’s official playlist!

The Walking Dead Riddim campaign drove 89 pieces of coverage with an overall media reach of 302,000,000 and became a hit record that was playlisted on three different national radio stations (Kiss, Radio One and Radio 1Xtra)!

The music video featuring NOW TV key messaging was viewed over 2 million times and generated a total Facebook reach of 3.2million of which half was organic.

This combined campaign helped viewing figures for the show on NOW TV rise by 17%* compared to the previous season.

NOW TV’s social channels saw their best organic Facebook engagement ever with 13.7k reactions to the video and following our activity, our target demographic of 18-30-year olds is now 1034x more likely to engage with NOW TV content.

The Walking Dead Riddim was the best performing piece of video content ever posted on NOW TV’s Facebook page and the overall social reach rose by 23%.