Halloween in advertising

Pizza Hut – Halloween Menu

Objective: to create fun and excitement for the annual festival in the proximity of the restaurant, at the same time drawing in customers with the special menu items.
Idea: while Halloween is a relatively small festive event in the Hong Kong market, there is a younger segment of Pizza Hut customers who are aware of the event, and are also Pizza Hut customers. In order to attract this crowd, a special menu has been developed for the promotion, including mostly items made with the one ingredient most consumers love about Pizza Hut’s pizzas – cheese! As the most important key to success for appealing to a younger crowd, the key to success lies in the ability to entice and draw in customers with interesting news through a display that they find relevant. With “cheese pull” having been established as an iconic visual device that Pizza Hut owns in the market, and cheese being a core ingredient in the menu items, the ghoulish face formed with the holes naturally represents the cheese as it stretches.
Results: while exact sales figures cannot be given out due for confidentiality reasons, a surge in customers during the period of the promotion, sizeable number of orders for the items in the festive menu, and long queues outside the restaurant are strong anecdotal evidence of the success of the promotion. Clients have also received favourable comments from their management team as well as their acquaintances.

Burger King

White Night Condoms

Fisherman’s Friend

McDonald’s – Happy Halloween

Guinness – Happy Halloween

Leo Burnett Chicago for McDonald’s

McDonald’s

NMRA Insurance

Ford

Mitsubishi Motors

Volkswagen Beetle – Trick or treat?

STP (Motor-Oil Company) – Happy Halloween

Heineken

Lynx Deodorant

In&Out Gay Bar – Halloween Party

Riverside Properties – Don’t drink and drive this Halloween

ETV Channel – Halloween Movie Festival

Theatric Plus (Halloween supply store)

This piece was wildly successful. It increased traffic to both the store and website, while the store celebrated their most successful Halloween ever. There were queues outside the store throughout the week of Halloween. Many of the customers that did visit the store praised the witches’ hats idea to store owners. Furthermore, the store owners were more than thrilled about this idea and hope to use it again next year.
Halloween is a very significant event in Canada. Everyone dresses up in costume – both adults and children. Some people leave their costume buying until the last minute. This particular Halloween supply store was small and easy to miss. So how do we drive traffic from the street to the store?
What better way to drive traffic to a store than using natural items on sidewalks as interruptions to passers-by? With construction always happening near this store, the idea was to dress up everyday caution pylons as witches’ hats and place them nearby. Pylons naturally had the right shape and the added black circular base completed the look. What better use of media than using an everyday pylon that resembled the most popular Halloween icon? You can’t miss a giant witch’s hat on the sidewalk! The sticker with store info helped successfully drive customers to the store and website.

Zen Department Store – Halloween Sales

The Brief: To draw customers from our competitor department stores. During this sale season, we have to get the highest brand awareness for our store.
The Solution: We designed a Halloween shopping bag that moves by itself, and placed it in busy areas, including our competitors’ store area.
The results: Customers had high brand recall, which helped generate high in-store traffic and boosted sales.

Gillette Fusion Proglide

The Brief
While Gillette was still the leader in the grooming segment, we were challenged by the client to keep the brand fresh and culturally relevant. The challenge was to create a buzz for Gillette at New York’s highly visible Halloween parade, which boasts of over two-million-strong participation.
The Idea
Gillette’s message of “fewer nicks and cuts with the ProGlide razor” was a perfect message for this Halloween event, which is often defined by costumes of blood, nicks and cuts. We created posters and activation using people with “razor cuts” costumes with the message “Don’t let every day be Halloween” printed on T-shirts. The Gillette spokesperson in the costume handed out razors whenever he saw person with blood and cuts. The costume of razor cuts was a huge draw and drew tremendous appreciation for the ingenuity of the message.
Results
A significant percentage of people in the Halloween parade are young males who are potential customers of Gillette. The event was a perfect setting to connect with them in a fun and relevant way without the product message sounding like a promotion. The message of “Don’t let every day be Halloween” seamlessly blended into the vibe of the parade, giving Gillette tremendous credibility. The promotion attracted a large number of young people who responded by taking pictures of the unique “razor cuts” costume and shared them online through Facebook and Twitter. The local media captured the promotion giving it a huge viewership. Hundreds of razor samples were given out which led to the supplies running out. The Gillette “razor cuts” man turned an everyday common razor cut into a message of relevance for Halloween. The “nicks and cuts” strategy became a foundation for an anti-disposable razor message that is being pursued in a national campaign for Gillette.

Child Abuse Action Group

The Brief
Even though their name suggests action, The Child Abuse Action Group (CAAG) is all about prevention. Our brief from the CAAG was exactly that – to create a campaign to encourage parents to start a conversation with their children about the realities of child abuse and to arm them with the required knowledge to identify possible abusers and to avoid dangerous situations.
The Idea
We had to get parents to educate their children about the monsters that exist in our society. To do this we decided to target parents at a time when monsters are most relevant. Parents would find it perfectly normal to receive a free monster mask whilst out shopping for Halloween outfits and during neigbourhood trick or treating and that’s exactly what our volunteers did. Of course there was a twist. The mask inside the pack didn’t resemble that of a zombie, but instead looked like a very ordinary looking person. The message: The scariest monsters don’t look like monsters. As with most NGO’s, funds are always an issue, the budgets for awareness campaigns are tight and any communication needs to work extremely hard and must absolutely cut through the clutter. We knew we had to ignite a conversation between the parent and the child instantly. Targeting parents at a time when they would be with their kids i.e whilst trick or treating or shopping for Halloween decorations was the perfect opportunity. Speaking to parents about child abuse at a time when their children would be knocking on strangers’ doors made the message even more relevant and impactful.
Results
The masks were very well received. Parents and their children interacted with the masks and talked about them. The client noted a definite increase in calls to the call centre, and traffic to the website doubled in the period following the campaign.

Guinness Halloween Ghosters

The Brief
Because there’s no tradition in stout beer, Romania is mostly a lager market. As a consequence, Guinness is a niche brand. Although Guinness has brand awareness, people are not drinking it because of the special taste and the higher price. The client wanted something to drive sales in the most important pubs in Bucharest for the Halloween night. And the challenge was to do something special and impactful with a very low budget.
The Creative Execution
Guinness is associated in Romania with the Western culture, so its association with Halloween was a perfect match. As a plus, the black color made it look perfect as a creature of the Halloween night. All we had to do was to transform the coasters into scary shadows. The idea was simple and cost effective: to produce special Halloween beer coasters for Guinness. The coasters appeared to be scary shadows of the Guinness glasses and were offered for every Guinness beer that was bought.
Results
The idea had an ‘I want one of those’ effect. People were curious to know what was all about with the Guinness coasters, then they found the idea nice and they wanted their own coasters. Actually some of them liked it so much, that they wanted to complete their ‘collection’. The client reported an increase in sales in different locations between 16 and 20% for that night and – as a side effect – everybody took home their scary – shadows coasters 5+

Nexcare 3M Badages

The objective of this effort was to build awareness of the size variety of Nexcare bandages. We made super sized stickers that looked like bandages and stuck them on various posters found in public places in the Halloween Season. Our target was: adults 25+

Weleda

The Brief: We had to find a budget friendly and creative way to reach our objectives, taking into account the following restrictions: Weleda is a small brand, only sold is some local shops, which has no huge advertising budgets. Advertising to children is legally very restricted in Belgium primarily under parental pressure. To maximize the effect and minimize parental resistance: we chose to reach both mother and child at the same time. On the moment of truth i.e. the day on which people go shopping massively for candies i.e. Halloween day.

The Soluton: plenty of people were on the streets, carrying the message with them and talking about it. In fact it had a kind of snowball effect; children and mothers were sharing their amazement with each other. What more can a brand dream of than the mere fact that people actually talk about and show sympathy for their advert.

The Results: local spontaneous brand awareness rose by 28% after one week. The event created huge sympathy as new people came to ask for a sample and for explanation about the brand. Another nice effect was the increase of total local traffic in the Weleda shops in the weeks after the event.

Society of Spiritualists

Ben Egnal (Art Director)

Trendy (Snack and Confectionery)

Snickers

San Francisco Zoo (Halloween Party)

Norte Beer (This Halloween don’t drink and drive)

M&M’s

Iglo Soup

Movistar – Halloween Promoton

Comic Club Shop