The dead really are walking in new ‘The Walking Dead’ ads produced by Ryan Reynolds

When you are a brand looking to keep the audiences engaged during commercial breaks, how do you do that? Hire Ryan Reynolds, of course.

Reynolds has proven himself to be masterful at marketing, and it seems that some brands have taken this onboard, turning to his production company Maximum Effort for help. This resulted in a genius marketing campaign that ran during the mass tune-in for the season finale of The Walking Dead.

Reynolds worked with Autodesk, Deloitte, DoorDash, MNTN, and Ring to create advertisements that linked their products to the show by using actors who had been killed off in prior episodes. The characters of Milton Mamet (Dallas Roberts), Andrea Harrison (Laurie Holden), Rodney (Joe Ando-Hirsh) and Gareth (Andrew West) were resurrected (somewhat) to appear in the ads for the above companies in a joint effort between Maximum Effort and AMC Networks’ Content Room.

Dan Sandborn of Kimmelot (Jimmy Kimmel’s creative lab for developing and producing television) also worked with the companies by piecing together the narratives for the brands.

The characters reappeared in zombie form, making for some rather humorous situations, such as Rodney’s head ordering DoorDash, and Gareth watching his relentless neighbors knocking at his door using Ring. Through tying the promos to the show, it gave the audience more of a reason to keep watching, and not tune out during the breaks.

All five advertisements were shot in two days, in two locations with Maximum Effort dealing with the production whilst consulting with Content Room, according to the partners on the production.

Talking about the thinking behind the advertisements, Reynolds stated to Deadline that “ads should be fun.” He continued, “The Walking Dead has generated more cultural conversation over the last decade than any other property and we wanted to honor that by bringing a few characters back from the dead in some fun contextual ads,” adding that commercials “can be a part of the cultural conversation as they once so frequently were. They just need a little more love, attention, and mischief.”

Reynolds sure knows how to bring the mischief and fun to any project he works on, and is great at taking something that should be quite gruesome and grizzly, and making it into something humorous.

You can now stream the season finale of The Walking Dead on AMC Plus, seasons one through 10 are currently available on Netflix in many markets, and it is expected that season 11 will join a few months down the line.