Holidays bring out the best in marketers, and Halloween is always a treat. From spooky to strange, these 5 memorable Halloween marketing campaigns capture the spirit of Halloween and our fear of clowns.
Burger King: #ScaryClownNight
Burger King cleverly combined Halloween, clowns, and their top competitor into a single marketing campaign.
The King’s #ScaryClownNight event, clearly aimed at their arch nemesis Ronald McDonald, plays on people’s (including yours truly) fear of clowns while associating it with McDonald’s. The first 500 guests on Halloween night that visit a Burger King restaurant gets a free Whopper – if they’re dressed up like a clown.
It’s a perfectly balanced Halloween marketing campaign that touches on a little bit of everything about the unsettling October holiday.
Netflix & Lyft: Strange Mode
Lyft got in cahoots with Netflix to promote their Halloween marketing campaign, ‘Strange Mode’, centered around the second season of their popular show Stranger Things.
“Lyft users in Philadelphia and Los Angeles can take an immersive Stranger Things ride – complete with static sounds, slugs, lights turning on and off, a being that seems to be stuck in the ceiling and reaches its hand down, people in hazmat suits and waffles,” says AdWeek.
Hazmat suits and waffles? We can’t think of a better segue into a night of ‘Netflix & chill’.
Ford: Car Wash Prank
People dressing up and scaring the pants off unsuspecting people is Halloween tradition. Ford took the classic Halloween prank to the next level in their holiday marketing campaign, giving drivers money to get a free car wash at a local gas station.
Once they drove their car into the car wash, the weirdness commenced. You’ll need to watch the video, we can’t do it justice:
Weren’t haunted houses enough? Anyway, going viral instantly is enough evidence that this Halloween marketing campaign was a monster smash, getting major media coverage from Mashable and AdWeeek.
Little Caesars: The Forbidden Pizza
Little Caesars pizza chain developed a special Halloween website that forbid customers from entering their physical address. If you try, you hear a voice begging you not to follow through with your order.
If you’re as gluttonous as us, after ignoring the voice, you’re taken to Google Maps where you’ll see the address (your house) haunted by cartoon ghosts. There are also some instructions – ‘Find out how to unhaunt’.
Clicking on that provides the user driving instructions to your nearest Little Caesars. Not bad, Little Caesars.
Snickers: The Horseless Headman
This wouldn’t be a Best Of list without the good marketers at Snickers. They’ve provided us with some of the most creative Halloween marketing campaigns in recent memory. Have you seen the exorcist one? And there’s the old lady at the supermarket. We won’t forget the man on the ladder anytime soon either.
But perhaps their most famous holiday marketing campaign of all was the Horseless Headman (not a typo):
We just gave you your Halloween costume idea for this year, didn’t we.
Struggling to come up with your own frighteningly-awesome marketing campaign for the holidays? Our team of marketing experts and print pros can conceptualize a marketing campaign for any holiday that’s scary good.