Dead Good: The 12 Marketing Campaigns That Owned Halloween

Halloween presents brands with an opportunity to do something a little different. It is a time when audiences are more receptive to unusual ideas, entertaining content and creative campaigns that break away from the everyday.

For marketers, that creates plenty of possibilities. A well-executed Halloween campaign can increase brand awareness, encourage social sharing, attract new customers and give people a reason to engage with a business they might otherwise overlook.

But what separates a genuinely effective campaign from another advert with a few pumpkins and a spooky soundtrack?

The best examples combine a strong creative idea with a clear understanding of the brand, its audience and the channels being used to reach people. Some use humour, others rely on suspense, while a few take an unconventional approach that makes them almost impossible to ignore.

Here are 12 Halloween marketing campaigns worth looking at, along with the ideas and strategies that made them stand out.

1. Liquid Death and Martha Stewart: Dismembered Moments

The marketing lesson: Unexpected collaborations can make people stop scrolling.

Liquid Death has built its identity around irreverent branding, dark humour and creative marketing that stands apart from conventional drinks advertising. Its collaboration with Martha Stewart took that approach to another level.

For Halloween 2022, the brand introduced the Dismembered Moments Luxury Candle, a limited-edition candle shaped like a severed hand clutching a can of Liquid Death Mountain Water. Stewart appeared in the campaign, bringing her familiar, polished presentation style to a decidedly gruesome product.

The idea worked because of the contrast. Martha Stewart is associated with cooking, entertaining and elegant home styling, while Liquid Death has a much more rebellious identity. Putting the two together created an unexpected combination that audiences had a reason to talk about.

It also gave the brand something more interesting to promote than a seasonal discount. The candle was a product in its own right, while the video provided entertainment that people could share even if they had no intention of buying it.

The Power of an Unexpected Partnership

An effective collaboration does not necessarily require two brands with similar audiences or personalities. Sometimes, the contrast is what makes the partnership interesting.

The size of the partner matters less than the distance between you. A local creator with a few thousand engaged followers can be a better fit than a brand ten times your size that already sells to exactly the same people.

The important thing is to make the partnership feel intentional. An unexpected collaboration works best when the idea makes sense for both brands, even if the initial combination seems unusual.

2. Tesco: Spookermarket

The marketing lesson: Turn an ordinary experience into something memorable.

Tesco's Spookermarket campaign transformed an everyday supermarket setting into a Halloween-themed experience.

Rather than relying entirely on product promotions, Tesco used ghosts, ghouls, witches and other spooky characters to bring the supermarket to life. The campaign was designed to showcase the fun side of the brand, with a video distributed through its social media channels.

The strength of the idea was its simplicity. Supermarkets are familiar environments, so introducing unexpected Halloween characters created a contrast that made the content entertaining.

It also gave Tesco an opportunity to demonstrate its brand personality. Instead of simply telling customers that it was getting into the Halloween spirit, the campaign showed them.

Making Everyday Experiences Memorable

Not every Halloween campaign needs a completely new product or an elaborate advertising concept. Sometimes, the most effective approach is to take something customers already recognise and give it a seasonal twist.

Think about the part of your business customers see most often. The menu. The waiting room. The side of the van. The order confirmation email nobody has looked at properly in three years. One of those, dressed differently for a fortnight, costs very little and gets noticed precisely because it sits somewhere nobody expects a campaign.

The aim is to give people a reason to notice, remember and interact with the brand.

3. Heinz: Tomato Blood and the Vegetarian Vampire

The marketing lesson: Make the seasonal idea reinforce what your product does.

Heinz has repeatedly used Halloween to explore the relationship between its products and familiar seasonal themes.

The Tomato Blood campaign made an existing connection official: ketchup has long been used as fake blood for Halloween costumes. Heinz leaned into that association with seasonal packaging and the story of a vegetarian vampire who prefers tomatoes to blood.

Tomatoes and ketchup are central to the joke, creating a natural connection between the product and the story. The campaign makes use of Halloween's familiar imagery without simply placing a seasonal graphic on a standard product advert.

That connection matters. The audience can understand the idea quickly, and the product remains central to the creative execution.

Heinz demonstrates how a brand can use an established product identity as the foundation for seasonal storytelling, rather than treating Halloween as a completely separate marketing exercise.

Finding Creativity in Your Own Products

The strongest seasonal campaigns often start with something distinctive about the product or service itself.

Here is the test. Does the connection survive if you take Halloween away? Heinz works because ketchup looked like blood long before anyone built a campaign on it. Where the link exists only because October arrived, the audience can tell, and the whole thing reads as a costume rather than an idea.

The seasonal element should help communicate the brand's value, not distract from it.

4. ASOS: #ASOSAlterEgo

The marketing lesson: Give your audience a reason to create content for you.

Explore the campaign: ASOS #ASOSAlterEgo on TikTok for Business View campaign

Halloween is naturally suited to visual content. Costumes, make-up, transformations and creative self-expression all lend themselves to social media, making it an ideal opportunity for brands to encourage audience participation.

ASOS used that opportunity with its #ASOSAlterEgo campaign, working with TikTok to encourage people to showcase their Halloween transformations.

The campaign included a branded hashtag challenge, a custom branded effect and collaborations with seven creators. Rather than making the entire campaign dependent on a single piece of brand-produced content, ASOS gave its audience a concept they could interpret and make their own.

According to TikTok's published case study, the campaign generated a 219% increase in relevant engagements, a 17% increase in relevant video creations and a 22.4% increase in ad recall. These figures are reported by the platform and relate to the campaign's own measurement framework.

The campaign illustrates the potential of combining creator partnerships with user-generated content. People were not just watching an advert; they had an invitation to participate in the idea.

Turning Your Audience Into Content Creators

Businesses do not need a major advertising budget to encourage audience participation.

What they need is an ask small enough that people will do it without thinking twice. Posting a photo takes seconds. Filming a transformation takes an evening. The further the ask sits beyond what someone will do on a wet Tuesday in October, the fewer people take part, however good the prize is.

If customers can contribute their own ideas, the campaign has the potential to generate content and conversations beyond what the business could produce by itself.

5. Fanta: Afterlife Train

The marketing lesson: Connect different channels around one creative idea.

In October 2024, Fanta launched a Halloween campaign inspired by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel to Tim Burton's supernatural comedy film.

The campaign featured the film's Afterlife Train and incorporated a partnership with the movie into a wider promotional experience. Advertising appeared across out-of-home, digital, cinema and social media channels, while QR codes invited consumers to access an interactive game through the Coca-Cola app.

The concept gave the campaign a recognisable creative world and extended the experience beyond a conventional advert. People could encounter the idea in different places and engage with it in different ways.

It also demonstrated how a brand can use a cultural partnership to give a seasonal campaign a stronger identity. Instead of creating an entirely separate Halloween story, Fanta connected its product to a film with an established audience and a recognisable visual style.

Creating a Connected Campaign Across Multiple Channels

A multichannel campaign works best when its different elements feel connected.

That does not mean posting the same thing everywhere. It means each channel carrying one idea in the form that channel is actually good at, so the person who stumbles across the third version recognises it as part of the first.

For businesses investing in digital marketing, this is a useful reminder that individual channels should support a wider strategy rather than operate independently.

6. McDonald's: Happy Halloween and Trick or Cheese?

The marketing lesson: Strong visual communication can make even the simplest idea memorable.

Explore the campaigns: Happy Halloween and Trick or Cheese? on Ads of the World.

McDonald's has demonstrated how familiar products can become the centre of creative seasonal advertising without requiring an elaborate storyline or major changes to the menu.

In Finland, the brand worked with creative agencies on two memorable Halloween advertising concepts. The first, Happy Halloween, transformed its familiar fries into a pair of vampire fangs against a dark background. The minimal imagery used the product, packaging and brand colours to communicate the idea immediately.

Another Halloween execution, Trick or Cheese?, turned a cheeseburger into a ghostly character. Melted cheese formed the face, with dark eye shapes and an open mouth, making the product itself the Halloween visual.

Both concepts show the value of having instantly recognisable brand assets. McDonald's did not need to explain its products or create a complicated story. The audience could understand the seasonal joke within seconds.

Why Simplicity Can Be a Creative Advantage

Businesses sometimes assume that memorable advertising needs elaborate production, multiple messages or extensive visual effects. McDonald's shows that a strong visual connection can be enough.

For smaller businesses, the lesson is to look closely at existing products, packaging, logos and brand colours. Those everyday assets may already contain the starting point for a seasonal campaign. The challenge is finding a connection that feels inventive rather than forced.

7. Burger King: The Call

The marketing lesson: Use familiar storytelling conventions to make an advert more engaging.

Horror films have a familiar language: unsettling sounds, unexpected interruptions, suspense and the feeling that something is not quite right.

Burger King's The Call campaign draws on that style of storytelling to give its advertising a more cinematic feel.

The broader lesson is that brands do not always need to communicate through a conventional product demonstration or a straightforward promotional message. Entertainment can be an effective way to capture attention, provided the creative idea remains connected to the brand.

Halloween is especially well suited to this approach because audiences already understand many of the conventions associated with horror. A campaign can establish a mood quickly, build anticipation and use a twist to make the content memorable.

Using Storytelling to Capture Attention

Think about the formats and stories your audience already recognises.

Horror is unusually generous here, because the conventions do half the work for you. A long corridor. A phone that rings twice. A door left slightly open. The audience fills in the rest before you have explained anything, which buys you attention most adverts have to pay for.

The important distinction is that the creative concept should support the message. An entertaining advert that leaves people remembering everything except the brand may generate views without delivering the intended marketing value.

8. Bacardí: Raising Spirits

The marketing lesson: Use your product's natural connection to a seasonal occasion.

Explore the campaign: Bacardí Raising Spirits creative work View campaign

Bacardí's Raising Spirits campaign takes advantage of a particularly natural Halloween connection: the word spirits. The concept brings together rum, cocktails and supernatural imagery without making the product feel incidental.

Its horror-inspired creative features an atmospheric graveyard where hands emerge from the soil and begin mixing drinks. The approach borrows from zombie films but gives the scenario a product-led twist: the undead appear to be making cocktails.

The idea is compelling because it turns a familiar seasonal phrase into a visual concept. Bacardí can entertain its audience while still showcasing the drinks it wants people to associate with the occasion.

Building a Campaign Around a Natural Connection

Strong seasonal advertising often starts with a connection that already exists between the brand and the occasion. For Bacardí, that connection is spirits; for other businesses, it could be an everyday customer concern or the name of a product.

Most businesses have one, and it is usually hiding in whatever customers are quietly dreading. The bill nobody warned them about. The files that disappeared. The job that got worse after someone came to fix it. Find that, and the seasonal treatment more or less writes itself.

9. IKEA: Monsters Not Included

The marketing lesson: Challenge audience expectations rather than following the same seasonal formula.

IKEA's Monsters Not Included campaign took a different approach to Halloween. Instead of trying to frighten viewers, it used familiar childhood fears to deliver a reassuring message about the home.

Three short films explored hiding spots often associated with imaginary monsters: under a bed, inside a wardrobe and behind a curtain. Each begins with suspenseful lighting and unsettling sounds, setting up the expectation of a Halloween scare.

Then a light switches on. The unsettling scene is simply an ordinary room, and the message is that IKEA furniture comes with no monsters included.

The reversal makes the campaign memorable. It borrows the cinematic language of horror but uses it to underline a brand association with comfortable, everyday living.

Turning Familiar Fears Into Positive Messaging

Many Halloween campaigns compete to be the scariest. IKEA shows that an unexpected change of direction can be more distinctive.

The structure is the part worth stealing. Build the fear your customers already carry, hold it a beat longer than is comfortable, then switch the light on. Done properly, the relief is the product.

10. Reese's: Dracula's Halloween Commercial (1990)

The marketing lesson: Adapt a familiar brand message to a seasonal setting.

Memorable Halloween advertising predates social media. Reese's 1990 Halloween commercial takes the familiar question of how people eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and gives it an amusing seasonal answer.

The advert introduces Dracula, whose method of eating the treat is shaped by his vampire instincts. The joke revolves around removing the peanut butter centre while leaving the chocolate shell behind.

What makes the advert effective is the speed of the idea. Viewers already understand the product and the character, so the brand can get straight to the joke without extensive explanation.

The campaign demonstrates how an established advertising platform can take on a fresh character while retaining the associations customers already recognise.

Using Familiar Brand Messages in New Ways

An established slogan, visual device or recurring theme can be a strength rather than a restriction. A seasonal adaptation gives familiar content a fresh context without requiring the business to reinvent its identity.

If people already recognise something you do, Halloween is permission to bend it rather than replace it. Change one element and leave everything else exactly where it was. The recognition is what makes the joke land in the first place.

11. Snickers: Zombie Twerk

The marketing lesson: Adapt an established brand idea instead of starting from scratch.

Snickers has built a recognisable advertising platform around the idea that people behave differently when they are hungry.

Its Halloween-themed Zombie Twerk advert takes that established brand idea into an unusual seasonal scenario, using absurd humour and a dancing zombie to create a memorable visual moment.

The creative approach is useful because it connects a seasonal execution to a broader brand identity. Halloween provides the setting, but the campaign still draws on an idea audiences can associate with Snickers.

That is an important distinction. A seasonal campaign should not necessarily feel like a completely different brand. When the creative execution builds on an established message, it can reinforce existing brand associations while giving audiences something fresh to watch.

Giving an Established Brand Message a Seasonal Twist

Look at what you already publish every month. The newsletter, the case study, the round-up nobody has changed since you started it. Putting one of those in costume for October is a far smaller job than inventing a campaign, and it lands better, because the audience already knows the format well enough to notice what is different about it.

The aim is to make the seasonal idea feel like a natural extension of the brand, not an unrelated attempt to join a trend.

12. UNICEF: Add Some Meaning to Your Halloweening

The marketing lesson: Give seasonal participation a purpose.

Halloween marketing does not have to be centred on selling products. It can also encourage people to support a cause, contribute to a community or take part in an activity with a wider purpose.

UNICEF has a long-standing association with Halloween fundraising through its orange trick-or-treat collection boxes. Its Add Some Meaning to Your Halloweening campaign explored how that tradition could be adapted for digital audiences, with online participation and donation opportunities.

The idea connects an established seasonal activity with a clear reason to get involved. Instead of asking people to participate purely for entertainment, it gives them an opportunity to contribute to something meaningful.

For charities and purpose-led organisations, this approach can make Halloween relevant without relying on product discounts or conventional sales promotions.

Making Marketing About More Than Sales

Halloween is one of the few nights of the year when people are already out knocking on each other's doors, which makes it unusually easy to attach something local to it.

The activity should be genuine and transparent. If a business makes a charitable claim, it should explain exactly what it is contributing and avoid implying that a donation is larger or more significant than it really is.

When the connection is authentic, seasonal marketing can provide a useful opportunity to strengthen relationships with customers and the local community.

What Makes a Successful Halloween Marketing Campaign?

These 12 campaigns demonstrate that there is no single formula for Halloween marketing. Some rely on humour, some use horror-inspired storytelling, while others encourage participation or connect a product to a wider cultural moment.

However, several common principles emerge.

Start With a Strong Idea

Halloween imagery alone is unlikely to make a campaign distinctive. Think about what will make the audience stop, take notice and remember the brand.

That could be an unexpected partnership, an unusual product, a clever story or an interactive experience.

Make the Campaign Recognisably Yours

A seasonal campaign should still feel connected to your business. Build on your existing brand personality, products, services or expertise rather than copying another company's creative approach.

Choose Channels That Suit the Idea

Short-form video may be appropriate for a visual transformation challenge, while an email campaign could work well for a limited-time offer. A blog could provide useful seasonal advice that attracts search traffic over a longer period.

The channel should support the creative idea and the outcome you want to achieve.

Give People a Reason to Engage

An audience is more likely to interact with content when it offers something beyond a sales message. Humour, useful information, a competition, an unexpected reveal or an invitation to participate can all provide that reason.

Measure More Than Views

Reach and engagement can indicate whether a campaign has attracted attention, but they do not automatically demonstrate commercial success.

Depending on your objectives, useful measures might include website visits, qualified leads, email sign-ups, sales, enquiries, conversions and the cost of acquiring a customer.

Set those objectives before launching the campaign so you can assess whether the activity delivered the intended result.

The Morning After

Halloween gives brands permission to experiment with creative ideas that might feel out of place at other times of the year. The most interesting campaigns use that opportunity to do more than add a seasonal theme to an existing advert.

Liquid Death demonstrates the value of unexpected partnerships. Tesco shows how a familiar environment can become entertaining. ASOS illustrates the potential of audience participation, while Fanta demonstrates how a seasonal idea can connect multiple channels.

For smaller businesses, the lesson is not to replicate the budgets or production values of global brands. It is to understand the thinking behind their campaigns and apply those principles on a scale that makes sense for your own audience and objectives.

A clever idea, a clear message and a well-planned digital strategy can go a long way towards making a seasonal campaign stand out.

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