Top 9 digital marketing campaigns of Halloween 2013

Most captured spooky and cheeky spirits of the season but some of them will make you think twice about your choice of costume.  However, all of them are great examples of how brands and organisations can create successful campaigns that piggyback on large events.

Kellogg’s Scary Rice Krispie

For its new range of rice krispies, “Malloween” and “Totally Shocklately”, Kellogg’s put up free vending machines at both Dublin Institute of Technology University campuses and shopping centers.   But is it TRICK or TREAT?  When people reach out to collect their free krispies from the machine, a hand reached to grab them. 

So far, the campaign videos have had around 240,000 views on the brand’s YouTube channel. 

Cheetos TP Project

Cheetos TP project will let you cause mischief this Halloween and virtually cover a site or building with toilet papers. Enter the post code or the name of the street that you want to attack, and once you are done, you can share the image with your friends through social media channels. At the time of writing this article, 115,829,926 feet of toilet paper had been dropped from Cheetos helicopter.     

  

Tide - Scared Stainless

I love these short videos from Tide and Vine seems to be a perfect platform for hosting them. Based on the classic horrors “Carrie”, “The ring”, “Shining” and others, the vines will make your hair stick up. The Procter & Gamble brand has around 114, 000 followers on Twitter.   

 

Snickers - Headless Horseman  

The brand’s message “You are not you when you are hungry” is one of the cleverest ad slogans from a snacking brand - probably because it makes me think that Snickers fully understands how I feel just before lunch. Their most recent campaign added a Halloween twist to the slogan, and I think it couldn’t have worked better. The video on the brand’s YouTube channel has nearly 380,000 views at the time of this article.     

#Mentalpatient

With all the hype of media and commercialisation, sometimes we lose the track of what is right and wrong when it comes to choosing a costume for Halloween. One example of that was Tesco and Asda’s mental patient costume that sparked the viral Twitter campaign #mentalpatient, initiated by mental health charities Mind and Time to Change and intended to raise awareness and end stigma. Individuals tweeted their photos with the hashtag to support the campaign, and as a result, both of the giant supermarkets apologised for the product and removed it from their websites. 

         

We're a culture, not a costume

Another clever awareness-related Halloween campaign was created by Ohio University Peer Education Group. Their 2011 campaign “I am not a costume” against racist costumes for Halloween attracted lots of attention from public and media. This year, the organisation ran a campaign with the message “We’re a culture. Not a costume”.  

                  

Rei- Zombie Survival Tool

This infographic from Rei, an outdoors retailer, will be the survival guide when the World War Z happens. It even teaches you 5 skills to escape from and attack the brain-eating ghouls – but of course, to stay alive during the apocalypse you will also need a helicopter or a friend in the government to pick you up from top of the building while zombies throw themselves at you. 

Great graphical execution and life-saving information make this infographic one of the top campaigns of Halloween 2013 for me :)

Benjamin Moore – Scariest jobs 

It is not easy to link interior and exterior house paints, primers and wood stains with ghosts and goblins, but Benjamin Moore created a whole website that featured the scariest jobs in the world. In the video, two contracted painters arrive at the job site but soon encounters some unnatural occurrences.

I wouldn’t want to be doing that job but would share the video with my friends on Facebook and Twitter, and that is what makes it good campaign.