NPR on CDC’s Zombie Campaign: The Cranberries Rise Again

I saw the Zombie Apocalypse post in my Facebook news feed this morning and did not fully realize at first that I was in fact on the CDC website.

There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.

The creativity of the campaign and coincidental timing of the blog just days before the prediction of the May 21 “Judgment Day” by some evangelical groups. Generated a large amount of traffic according to Reuters and the CDC.

“If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse, you’ll be prepared for all hazards,” CDC spokesman Dave Daigle told Reuters over the phone on Thursday…

…Daigle said that a typical CDC blog post might get between 1,000 and 3,000 hits. The most traffic on record had been a post that saw around 10,000 visits.

By the end of Wednesday, with servers down, the page had 60,000. By Thursday, it was a trending topic on Twitter.

The campaign was designed to reach a young, media-savvy demographic that the CDC had not been able to capture before, Daigle said.

Increased traffic did not effect the main CDC website.

Even NPR’s All Things Considered got in on the humor.

Shortly after the CDC posted the tongue-in-cheek advice, the site was mobbed and it crashed. But, never fear, it has been resurrected and you can get to it through NPR.org.

After which you will want to reminisce…

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