“Mad Men” Yourself…Again!

“We knew we had to get people engaged with the show before the first episode of the season. One way, was to create this highly engaging experience not connected to the show itself, but around the show,” explained Deep Focus CEO, Ian Schafer, who teamed up with AMC last year to create the ubiquitous Mad Men Yourself promotional campaign.

Situation: Ever since its premiere on July 19, 2007, Mad Men has been one of the most critically acclaimed shows on cable television. But ever since the season three finale on November 8th, fans have gradually turned to other shows for their much needed cable fix. And who could blame them? Eight months is a long time to sit around and wait for our favorite Mad Men–and women–to come around. AMC knew it needed a brilliant campaign to rope in its avid fanbase once again for the season four premiere, and traditional TV spots just weren’t going to cut it.

Solution: Just as the old saying goes — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Leading up to the wildly successful season three, AMC launched Mad Men Yourself, an app which allowed users to create avatar versions of themselves mirroring the instantly recognizable styles and characters from the series. It wasn’t long before the application was practically as popular as the show itself, with Mad Men avatars popping up right and left as Twitter icons, desktop wallpapers and Facebook profile pictures. For the upcoming season four premiere, AMC decided to mold the Mad Men Yourself campaign into an updated version centered around the same fundamental concept of user-generated promotion: “Mad Men” Starring You!

Results: Functioning as a viral video instead of a sharable image, the new Mad Men Yourself tool created by image cropping kings, JibJab, lets users upload pictures of their faces to the bodies of Betty, Don, Roger or Joan. Once the user has completed their cropping, the video plays as a compilation of clips recapping all of the drama, sex and suspense from the previous seasons. It’s a perfect way for AMC to ensure pre-premiere buzz by not only reintroducing fans to their favorite characters in a fun and interactive way, but also encouraging non-fans to jump on the Mad Men bandwagon with the high sharibility factor of the videos.

The Mad Men Yourself site received a whopping 1 million unique visitors. Out of those 1 million, 600,000 of them created avatars — not too shabby for what’s essentially just a silly toy. The first episode garnered 3.3 million viewers, and went on to become one of Nielsen’s Top 10 timeshifted primetime TV programs with a 57.7% increase in viewership. Not surprisingly, AMC is hoping for better than ever ratings with an even more impressive viral campaign already in place for the highly anticipated season four premiere.