Burger King is always trying to find new ways to surprise customers and increase sales on Halloween. And 2022 wasn’t different. How could we keep Burger King as one of the main brands that people think about when Halloween comes to mind?

Experts have always used a magnetometer to search for paranormal activity. And guess what? Every smartphone has a magnetometer built in. That’s how we turned every Burger King app around the world into a ghost detector and invited customers to search for ghosts at home. The deal was simple: if they had a spooky guest, they'd have a 2x1 Whopper promo unlocked for delivery. One Whopper for them, one Whopper for their uninvited friend.

We launched Home of The Ghosts with a film where a scared teenager tries to find get her phone while ghosts seem to hunt her house. The phone isn't to call for help, but to detect paranormal activity and redeem our promo. The film run in dozens of countries and got the whole world talking about the idea, but we also used influencers to spread the word among young people.

To implement the idea, we had to connect the magnetic field sensor found in every smartphone to our app. Our film was launched just before Halloween week, and at the same moment, every Burger King app had turned into a ghost detector in 14 countries.

With +112,000 ghosts detected in 14 countries, everyone was talking about these terrifying guests. By making homes the scariest places this Halloween, we developed our most successful delivery promotion ever, generated +22% app downloads globally and 2.8 billion impressions.