With thousands of brands competing against each other to win over customers, event-based campaigns are becoming an essential part of public relations today. Consumers are spending more and more each year on Halloween, with an increase from $8.4 billion to $9.1 billion between 2016 and 2017. Many brands are taking advantage of this spooky time of the year by launching their own Halloween campaigns to draw in customers.
In honor of Halloween, we have our scariest PR campaigns from the past decade, guaranteed to give you the chills!
1. MGM films staged a telekinetic surprise
In 2013, to promote “Carrie,” a remake of the original 1976 version, its distribution company MGM Films created a Halloween surprise for customers who were taking a coffee break at a local coffee shop in New York. An actress pretended to become enraged with a waiter and revealed she had “telekinetic powers,” causing complete chaos in the shop. The video has almost 100 million views.
2. LG’s falling elevator
In 2012, LG wanted to show the world how lifelike its new range of IPS monitors was, so they put a series of nine monitors on the elevator floor. When a person stepped inside the elevator the screens played a video that made it look like the elevator floor was falling. This video quickly went viral and has more than 40 million views on YouTube.
3. IT remake featured a themed horror house
After the infamous horror film “IT” was remade in 2017, Warner Bros. Entertainment set up a horror-themed house in Hollywood to scare fans and garner more interest in the movie. The horror house featured a range of live actors, along with projections and animatronics. It paid off–the movie brought in $190 million worldwide, landing it in the top 10 most successful horror film releases to date.
4. Fanta’s VR horror experience
To celebrate Halloween last year, Fanta provided fans with a virtual reality horror experience where they got into an elevator that suddenly halted in its tracks. They were then “mistakenly” taken to the “secret” 13th floor, where they experienced terrifying Halloween surprises.
5. Burger King’s Halloween clown
Competitors often take on campaigns to create the most hype–as Burger King did for Halloween in 2017 when they trolled McDonald’s. In an ad posted by the major fast food chain, the company included a series of clowns that were dressed like the McDonald’s mascot–only a lot scarier. The video went viral after its launch with over 600,000 views on YouTube.
Even if as a seasoned PR pro you’ve grown out of trick-or-treating, you can still take advantage of the significant PR opportunities Halloween offers, allowing you to build your brand and reach your target audience.
Happy Halloween!
Critical Mention
Vladimir Mirnii
Vladimir Mirnii’s career began as a content writer and he quickly rose through the ranks and is now the founder and CEO of ContentAdore, a content marketing agency based in Ukraine. His agency focuses on blogging, sales and website pages and eBooks. ContentAdore’s goal is to increase web traffic and leads through valuable content marketing strategies.
