Single, male, undead

Susan Krashinsky

Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 25, 2009 05:56PM EDT

"That’s one thing about zombie fans: they take it really seriously. So it had to look really good. We couldn’t just take a picture and put a hole in somebody’s head." - Mark Nishiguchi, managing partner at Vancouver-based firm Noise Digital

There are some markets Lavalife and eHarmony just don’t serve. Zombies, for example. The undead need love too. Luckily, Zombie Singles fills that void. The site includes listings from Gorey Gretta, “a female zombie seeking a male for casual feeding.” and Guhhhhhh, who likes “blocked exits” and “people buffet,” and dislikes “the hunger.” In truth, Zombie Singles is the award-winning brainchild of Noise Digital, which created the faux dating site last year to advertise zombie-themed mobile phone-based video game Resident Evil Degeneration. The campaign won bronze in the cyber competition at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes this week. A particularly attractive candidate is Kiki from Indonesia, whose “fiends” list is positively gutted – er, glutted. We hope he finds love. The bar scene can be such a meat market.

***FLASH***Cannes hands Canada four more Lions

by Carey Toane and Mary Maddever
Media In Canada

If zombies make your heart pound in a good way, then the news of Canada's only Cyber Lion will set you a-flutter. Vancouver-based Noise Digital won Canada's only Bronze Lion for "Zombie Singles," an undead dating site to build buzz for Resident Evil: Degeneration on the Nokia N-Gage platform.

Dubbed the "official dating site of the walking dead," ZombieSingles.com invites lonely brain-cravers to upload photos to be "zombified," browse and rate other gruesome profiles or let the matchmaker take a crack at finding love for them.

"It was a big hit," says Canadian jury member Stephane Charier, ECD at Taxi Montreal. "We laughed, had so much fun. Juries are human - just because of that I think it inspired a lot of love."

"Zombie Singles" was the only win out of the eight entries shortlisted yesterday, and Charier notes that the Canadian work submitted "was very good, but Cannes is like the Olympics...We're still doing safe work, still doing microsites, not involving the consumer enough."

The jury awarded three Grand Prix, the only category required to do so, for the top Website and Interactive Campaigns, Online Advertising and Other Interactive Digital Media, and Viral Advertising. Entries dropped more than 500 from last year, with a total of 2,205 entries this year. Out of the 208 shortlisted, 80 went home with a medal.

All three Grand Prix went beyond the limits of the typical microsite, involving consumers in real-world conversations and collaborating with other kinds of marketing and media says Cyber jury president Lars Bastholm, chief digital creative officer of Ogilvy, North America. "Digital no longer lives in a vacuum, it's part of larger campaigns."