There are 8,760 hours in every year. But only 3 of them are spent trick-or-treating. Every minute counts.

Our idea was to upgrade everyone’s favorite Halloween tradition – trick-or-treating – by providing a fun, interactive tool to help trick-or-treaters maximize their time on Halloween.

Treatster was the first-ever, crowd-sourced social network for trick-or-treating designed to help families in the U.S. find and share the most epic houses in their neighborhoods. The mobile platform gave trick-or-treaters the power to discover and share the houses with the spookiest decorations, funkiest costumes, and best candy – in real-time directly from their trick-or-treating routes.

To bring the digital experience to life, we built 3D-printed, GPS-connected “smart” Jack-O-Lanterns that let trick-or-treaters vote for a house or add it to TargetTreatster.com right from their pumpkin. The pumpkins were built to directly send feedback to the Treatster database, and they emitted spooky sounds and served as traditional candy-carrying devices.

We developed a mobile-first site called TargetTreatster.com which used a Google API and geo-fencing to allow trick-or-treaters to tag the best locations as "treats”. The more "treat" votes a location received, the larger the corresponding pumpkin pin on the site appeared in real-time.

Simply put, bigger pumpkins on the map meant better houses: spookier decorations, crazier costumes and, of course, better treats. The simple interface allowed families to use the dynamic map together to vote and scout-out their next location directly from the doorstep.

We shared our 3D-printed smart pumpkins with select PR outlets and home and family-focused influencers, who incorporated the pumpkins into their digital and social content, and also shared night-of content highlighting the pumpkins interacting with the mobile social network.

Using a combination of paid, owned, and earned digital media, we amplified Treatster with video and social content.

The social network generated immediate coverage in national publications such as TIME, Forbes, Fortune, CBS, AdAge, Adweek, Creativity, and PR Week – as well as local sites people would be reading as they prepared their trick-or-treating routes.

Within just a few days of launch, the brand saw over 7,300 houses added to the site. Over Halloween week, more than 85,000 users joined the network, spending an average of 1:41 minutes on the platform during each session.

Target accomplished what it set out to do: Treatster got people talking, and talking about Target. In one week, Treatster garnered over 40 million impressions with 95% positive net sentiment.

Most importantly, Target saw an 18% increase in Halloween sales year-over-year, netting out at $9 million over forecasted sales.