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As Halloween approaches, five of the best spooky marketing campaigns

Halloween is nearly here

It must have felt like a long day in the office of McDonald’s social media team yesterday as Twitter exploded with anger at its poorly received 2022 Halloween campaign.

Many Tweeters suggested that the fast food giant’s #TrickorEat campaign was poorly judged at a time when the #HeatorEat hashtag is a real thing, but Halloween doesn’t have to be a nightmare for brands.

As some light relief for Maccy D’s marketing team, and our readers alike, here are five of our favourite campaigns that didn’t go down like a lead balloon at Halloween over the last decade.
 

LG, So Real it’s Scary, 2012

An oldie but a goody from LG. The electronics giant went to a lot of trouble for the October 2012 launch of its latest IPS monitors (which have probably not aged as well as the campaign given the pace of technology.)

LG’s engineers fitted out a lift floor with the monitors, as well as hidden speakers which made the noise of the creaking floor collapsing as the lift floor appeared to give way under passengers feet, leaving them staring into a gaping abyss below.

The ad had over 10 million views in just one week, and this was back in 2012, remember. It was picked up by TV shows and newspapers all over the world, and LG reported a 20 per cent jump in market share across key markets on the back of it.

LG: So Scary it’s Real


Marmite, Trick and Treat jars, 2018

In 2018, Marmite riffed on the theme of the spread’s divisive nature, and the fact that it’s perhaps the culinary world’s most celebrated/loathed “love-it-or-hate-it” product with novelty Halloween packaging offering green “poison” for the haters, and pink “potion” for the lovers. We can’t honestly imagine the gimmick would have won too many avowed haters round to the cause of the bitter, yeasty goop inside the jar, but full marks for creativity none the less.
 


Tesco, Spookermarket, 2018

Tesco’s comical campaign saw storeaisles decked out for Halloween with haunted shopping trolleys, staff members jumping out in ghoulish masks and even disembodied heads behind toilet rolls.

Hidden cameras recorded the startled responses of unsuspecting shoppers as they encountered the scary surprises in the nationwide stores. The video got more than 1 million views in less than five days. To follow up, Tesco released Halloween-themed tutorials showing customers how they could spook their family and friends with DIY projects featuring Tesco products.

ccording to data from Campaign Live, Tesco was the most talked-about supermarket on social media and 80 per cent of overall Tesco Halloween conversations were positive.


Tesco Spookermarket


Heinz Tomato Blood, 2021

For last year’s Halloween campaign, Heinz took the simplest premise to reach out to customers. For years, everyone from Halloween revellers to b-movie directors and am-dram societies have gleefully used its tomato ketchup as fake blood. Quite simply, concluded the global food behemoth, “if you have Heniz, you have a costume.”


Heinz Tomato Blood


Burger King clowns, 2017

It seems almost cruel to give the last word to McDonald’s deadly rivals in the circumstances, even more so in a campaign directly taking aim aim at McDonald’s and their “loveable” clown mascot Ronald.

In 2017, however, the burger chain’s “Come as a Clown, Eat Like a King” campaign, backed by the hashtag #ScaryClownNight, drew on the double whammy of both trolling its biggest rival, and capitalising on the popularity of the recently released scary-clown-horror IT. The chain offered free meals to those arriving at its restaurants dressed up as clowns, and duly attracted a crowd of hundreds of clowns to its Leicester Square branch, and plenty of column inches in the process.


Burger King/Pinterest

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