Fanta Didn't Buy Its Halloween Impressions. Your Orange Wrapper Won't Earn Any.

Fanta Didn't Buy Its Halloween Impressions. Your Orange Wrapper Won't Earn Any.

Fanta's global vice president of marketing, Ibrahim Khan, told Adweek the brand's Halloween program generated more than 7 billion impressions through fan-generated content without paid media spend. Seven billion. Nobody bought them. Fans made them, on their own phones, because Fanta gave them something worth filming.

Khan put the ambition plainly to Marketing Dive in August: "What Christmas is to Coke is what we want Halloween to be for Fanta." That's a soda brand trying to own a night on the calendar the way its parent company has owned December for most of a century. And it's going about it the slow way, which is the only way that works.

What Fanta actually built

The cans came first. Fanta put horror characters on the package (Chucky, Michael Myers and Beetlejuice have all shown up on past Halloween runs), and Adweek reports the Universal Pictures and Blumhouse deal behind the collectible horror cans. People keep a can like that. They line them up on a shelf and post the shelf.

This year Fanta went further and launched the Haunted Universe, its own cast of original characters: a jack-o'-lantern-headed scarecrow, a vampire who drives a sports car, a cyborg Frankenstein and a werewolf DJ, all chasing a magic elixir. Khan told Marketing Dive it took a year and a half to build. It runs in 50 markets, and Fanta calls it a multiyear effort. Influencers got the backstories so they could play in the world themselves.

Same cast rolls back in every October. Fans already know the lines before the brand says a word.

The orange wrapper problem

Edward Perotti has designed more than 2,000 events, and he told Bakery & Snacks this week what most brands do with Halloween. They "slap an orange wrapper on the same old product." He called it "lazy seasonal marketing," and he's being polite.

His counterexample is Reese's. A pumpkin-shaped cup and a ghost-shaped cup are, in his words, "an invitation to play." The shape is the content. Nobody films an orange wrapper, but people stage a peanut butter pumpkin on a party tray every single year.

The orange wrapper fails on social for the same reason it fails at the party. There's nothing to do with it. Fanta handed its fans characters they already knew, on cans worth keeping. An orange wrapper hands them nothing.

I checked my own site for the same mistake

Before writing this I pulled the sitemap for gallucci.net. It lists 1,053 blog posts. Not one has Halloween in the URL. One has the word seasonal. I've written about food brands for years, and I've treated the calendar the way most of them do. The holiday shows up, and I write about whoever else showed up for it.

That's the gap a small brand can close. Costs a lot less than a year and a half and a Blumhouse license.

How a small food or beverage brand owns one night

Pick the occasion and lock it for three years. Halloween. The first cold front. Opening day of dove season. The county fair. Whatever night your customers already plan around. The point is repetition. Fanta's 7 billion impressions came from people who expected Fanta to show up and had something ready when it did.

Change the shape of the thing. If you make a cookie, cut one Halloween shape by hand and make it the same shape every year. If you make a drink, build one serve: the glass, the garnish, the way it gets poured. Perotti's test is whether someone would put it on the party table on purpose. If they wouldn't, they won't post it either.

Give it a character or a ritual your customers can copy. Fanta has a werewolf DJ. You might have the founder's grandmother's recipe card, the same dented pot every October, or the guy who has worked the fryer for eleven years. It needs a face, and it needs to come back.

Then hand fans a format they can shoot with one prop. New Engen's October roundup lists the Pumpkin Head Illusion as "one prop and zero editing": a real pumpkin held to the lens so it covers a friend's head. Put your package behind the gourd. That's an organic social media strategy you can run with a phone and a trip to the grocery store, and it's exactly the kind of fan-made content Fanta built a franchise on.

Halloween lands on a Saturday this year. There's still time to shoot the first year of a three-year ritual and there's never enough time to fake one. I've written about the fall orchard slot Halfday took from Big Food, and about why renting someone else's tradition costs more than building your own. A big brand needs a license, an agency roster and a year and a half to make people care about a werewolf. You need one shape, one face and the nerve to do it again next October. If you're shopping for a food and beverage marketing agency to plan your holidays, ask them which night of the year your brand will own in 2029. Most of them won't have an answer.

I set up one owned seasonal ritual like this for a few food and beverage brands every fall. If you want next October spoken for before this one's over, DM me.