Brief:

• The Last Wine Company will soon sell two "Walking Dead"-themed wines with labels that come to life through an augmented reality (AR) app, according to a press release by the company. Next month, consumers can buy the cabernet sauvignon or "blood red blend" to celebrate February's mid-season premiere of the hit AMC series about a zombie apocalypse.
• Consumers can download the Living Wine Labels mobile app and activate the AR experience by pointing their smartphone at the wine bottles. The cabernet sauvignon label shows a zombie breaking through the bottle, while the blood red blend features an AR version of the show's lead character Sheriff Rick Grimes fighting zombies in the store aisle. Pointing the app at both bottles side by side triggers the characters to fight each other.
• The two California wines are set for release nationwide in February for $18.99. The corks are collectible, featuring images like barbed wire and a zombie head.

Insight:

"The Walking Dead" franchise, which was has been successfully extended into a spinoff series, a talk show, multiple video games and a mobile game, brings new promotional tie-ins for each new season and half-season to engage its fans in some way throughout the year. Now, it's demonstrating the creative ways AR can be leveraged by a brand to drum up excitement for the hit AMC show ahead of the upcoming mid-season premiere. Come February, people can express their fandom with just a bottle of specially labeled wine and a smartphone.

This isn't the first time marketers have incorporated the popular TV show into products or mobile features. Last year, AMC and wine brand Lot18 released its own wine collection inspired by the TV show. This newer collection, however, was created with Skybound Entertainment, the company that launched the original comic book in 2003. Before the fall 2017 premiere of show's eighth season in October, AMC released a free virtual reality (VR) app featuring two computer-generated experiences: "Devoured," which lets viewers experience getting eaten by zombies, and "Herd," which gives users the perspective of walking as a zombie in an undead mob. AMC in September also partnered with PepsiCo soda brand Mountain Dew to promote the show with its own AR mobile app, "The Walking Dead Encounter."

More broadly, wine and liquor brands have been active in promoting their products with mobile campaigns, increasingly with labels that activate some kind of smartphone feature through an app. Spanish winemaker Barbadillo boosted sales from a campaign where 126,000 bottles were packaged with near-field communication (NFC) tech for users to interact with via smartphone. Thirty percent of consumers who tapped the bottles in stores to see more product information on their mobile device went on to buy the wine, demonstrating the potential effectiveness of creative mobile tie-ins.