October brings cooling temperatures, pumpkin flavored everything and of course, an onslaught of ghost and goblin themed content. Being spooky at Halloween is simply table stakes for advertisers. However, what people really crave during Halloween is a desire to get the adrenaline pumping with the help of haunting, bone chilling tales; twice as many horror movies are released in October than any other month of the year. If we were going to break through during October we needed to go beyond the expected and produce hair raising, cinematic quality horror content.

We produced four, two-minute horror films for no incremental spend above Mars’ Upfront commitment. We knew we needed to go beyond the expected “jump scare” and to go deeper, to a bone-chilling fright that only a true horror film director could achieve.

The Mars films, Skittles’ “Floor 9.5”, M&Ms’ “The Road”, Starburst’s “The Replacement”, and Snickers’ “Live Bait” were developed and produced by up and coming horror directors. Each opened with an intro from the respective brand and then in two minutes hooked audience, taking them on a disturbing, Black Mirror-esque ride. For example, “Floor 9.5” turned an elevator, after a long day at the office, into your worst nightmare.

Films ran during traditional commercial time in mass reaching FOX programming like the Major League Baseball playoffs and contextually relevant programs like American Horror Story and Ghosted. All films were also available on Fox.com and YouTube.

Thanks to these films, Mars’ Halloween was anything but frightening. Social chatter about the films and brands skyrocketed, with Skittles seeing the highest boost in social conversation of +750%, and the films achieved the highest ad retention of any advertiser in October of 2017. People loved the films, calling them “better than 90% of the horror movies on Netflix” and “creepier than every horror move that came out in the past 3 years.” And despite being outspent, Mars’ share increased by 1.8 points and Mars achieved the largest Halloween sales gain in 5 years.