Halloween isn’t just a holiday where people dress up and go trick-or-treating, it’s also a great time for marketers to engage consumers with spooky marketing campaigns. In fact, October is an ideal marketing month with nearly 40 percent of consumers kicking off their holiday shopping.
Over the past few years, many brands have created commercials to captivate their audiences in new and exciting ways. This spooky season, we thought we’d share with you three of our favorite Halloween marketing campaigns.
Burger King trolls McDonalds…with clowns
Burger King has always had great marketing ideas, but their Halloween campaigns always seem to include a familiar clown from a rival fast food company, but in 2017 Burger King released a commercial where they offer a free Whopper burger to the first 500 people to visit select Burger King stores dressed as a clown. The campaign was promoted with a creepy clown-filled video with the hashtag #ScaryClownNight. The slogan is our favorite “Come as a clown, eat like a King”.
Netflix
Netflix & Chill has become a very popular term we’ve all used at one point in our lives, so Netflix decided that this year they would launch a marketing campaign with a play on those words, “Netflix & Chills”. It’s a list of movies and TV shows that are categorized by how scary they are. So you can decide what you want to watch based on the “scare factor” infographic.
Snickers
How good would the list of our favorite Halloween marketing campaigns be if we didn’t include a candy company? Last but certainly not least is Snickers which scar-ifies their main campaign slogan, ‘you’re not you when you’re hungry’ every Halloween. In 2013, they released a commercial called the “Horseless Headsman” which is a play on the Headless Horseman. He gets his costume confused and is wandering the streets trying to scare people, until a child gives him a snickers and he turns back into his regular scary self. Snickers proves here that infusing humour into your marketing and advertising campaign is a great way to grab attention.
Halloween is a perfect opportunity for marketers to be imaginative and put a different spin on products or services. Every year, companies may try to top previous years with even more creative, outrageous, and scarier campaigns. By standing out in a sea of competitors, brands are able to truly engage and capture the imaginations of their customers. We hope to see even better Halloween ads and campaigns in the future. Wishing you a spooky Halloween!
