“Audiences hold the mic”: how virality became Fanta’s secret marketing weapon

In honour of the spooky season, I was invited to take a tour of the Haunted Fanta Factory – a terrifying immersive experience starring the horror icons of Fanta's latest Halloween campaign. Getting bigger and better each year, Fanta is on a mission to become the Halloween equivalent of what Coca-Cola is to Christmas, pushing the boundaries of what spooky seasonal marketing can be.

For a detailed insight into the new campaign, I sat down with Fanta's global VP, Ibrahim Salim Khan, to discuss the project from brand strategy to audience reception. What began as a playful collaboration has exploded into coveted virality, proving that at its core, authenticity is the key to a successful campaign.

I began by asking Ibrahim about Fanta's approach to merging the seasonal theme with its existing brand identity. "When it comes to Halloween, haunted houses are a big part of the activities people love doing," he says. "The challenge was, doing themed experiences isn't something people expect of a soft drink brand. So for us to make it really credible, genuine and authentic was important."

It wasn't a collaboration without risk, as Fanta had the difficult challenge of appeasing a crowd of opinionated horror fans. "If you want to make everyone happy, you sell vanilla," Ibrahim says.

"If you look at the selection, you've got characters like Chucky and Michael Myers and Freddy Fazbear that have transcended the horror genre – they're lighthearted, fun characters that fit well with the brand. The harder characters, like the Grabber, lean a bit more into the genre, but there's always a little bit of a risk that some people won't like it. We're being careful, we don't want to alienate anyone."

Standing out from the crowd and avoiding seasonal cliches is a key factor in Fanta's brand strategy, mitigating the danger of soullessly commercialising a beloved IP. "It's about clarity on the strategy and the idea of what Halloween can do for Fanta," Ibrahim tells me."That's why we have a very simple idea behind the whole campaign – Fanta is so delicious, even the dead crave it."

"When you work with fandom communities and IPs, it's always a big risk, so we've tried our best to stay as authentic as we can. Anyone can slap an IP on packaging. The way that we've done it is with a lot of love and attention, so much so that fans are cutting it out and they're putting it on their walls."

For Fanta, avoiding soulless marketing was as much a practice in listening to its partners at Blumhouse and Universal Pictures, alongside fans. "There's a tension between us and the partners – a good constructive tension. Otherwise, we would end up overly commercialising it."

Naturally, design plays a huge part in the campaign, playing on marketing tactics like exclusivity and collectability to engage Fanta's audience. "The whole experience starts from the product innovation," Ibrahim explains.

"Whether it's that limited-time flavour or the packaging, we have collectibility in mind. When the pack hits the market, the conversation starts. We don't have to do anything. One teenager will post it on TikTok, and then the next morning, everyone will see it. We hadn't spent a dollar on media, and already we had hundreds of millions, if not billions, of impressions. We don't hold the mic anymore. The era of TV is gone – audiences hold the mic."

Despite the operational complexity of the campaign, Ibrahim claims his team has been "blown away" by the response. "When we looked at what we had made, we knew it would work, but the way that it worked was just incredible. The creativity that we saw from our customers inside their stores, making works of art or using the packaging to create shrines to Chucky – it was it's really good to see."

Now the big question remains – what's next? "This is step one in what we call the rediscovery of Fanta – it's an icon that we're bringing back to culture," Ibrahim explains. "We have a vision for Fanta to be the first entertainment brand in the soft drink industry. We're thinking about it. How do we make this even bigger?" Ibrahim concludes.

The Haunted Fanta Factory will run from 29th-31st October, from 6-11 pm at High Line Nine, NYC. For UK fans, the experience will be coming to London from 30th October - 2nd November.