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Halloween advertising - the brands getting it RIGHT and the ones getting it WRONG!

By Mel Peck

October 30, 2013 | 6 min read

Videos curated by the VAN team.

Top Viral Ad Campaigns:

With every national holiday comes a barrage of themed ads from marketers hoping to leverage the celebrations to raise the profile of their brand and Halloween is no exception.

Releasing a festive campaign can be a pretty smart move for advertisers seeking to piggyback on consumer search trends, but just being ‘topical’ isn’t enough to get people sharing your content. We sifted through a sting of Halloween related ads this week, but with the exception of a brilliant little viral gem from Crest toothpaste, none of them have made it into our top-10 most shared list.

Simply throwing in a few kids in fancy dress costumes, a couple of ghosts and ghouls and putting pumpkin faces on your products won’t make your video go viral. Brands need to include the right mix of triggers to generate conversations and get people sharing. Judging by the success of Crest’s ‘Halloween Treats Gone Wrong’, it looks like the secret ingredient to viral magic is a little girl puking up!

In an effort to explore the possibility of a sugar-free Halloween, the toothpaste brand presented a group of out spoken kids with a range of healthy candy alternatives, including vegetable jellies, nori-pops and tofu ghost-mallows. The children’s reactions are hilarious. One little boy complained that they tasted like poo, another spat the food out into his space helmet and one poor little girl was actually sick all over the table after attempting to eat an artichoke buttercup!

It’s cute, it’s gross and it’s funny – three things that the internet loves. But what’s more, the brand actually found a clever angle that made itself relevant to the Halloween theme by giving the thumbs up to sugary treats as long as you finish off the holiday with a solid brush and floss. In contrast, commercials from the likes of Pepsi and AT&T appeared to be simply jumping on the holiday bandwagon purely for the sake of it with generic campaigns that had little real relevance to the occasion. #HalloweenAdFAIL!Also popping up on our viral radar is a rather novel approach to inflight safety videos from Virgin America. It’s probably safe to say that nobody pays attention to safety announcements on planes anymore, right? Well, in an effort to get passengers to start listening up, the airline has produced an all-singing, all-dancing safety song featuring some of the top dancers, singers and choreographers from American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.Launched on Google Play, YouTube and digital billboards across America, the video is not only a refreshing change for in flight passengers but also a clever bit of viral advertising for the airline, (which has seen the video featured across numerous blogs and news outlets since it launched).

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Also trending...An awesome YouTube compilation from Vileda Italia, taking some of the interweb’s favourite kitteh clips and splicing them together to illustrate the cleaning power of cats, um, I mean Vileda mops!Plus, if you were ever in any doubt about the magical powers of tea, this little musical tribute from Yorkshire Tea will set the record straight! Kudos to our Rubber Republic team for creating the theme tune to my day!

Top Homemade and Entertainment Virals:

Last week, a group of women in Saudi Arabia defied the ban on driving and took to the wheel, uploading videos of themselves to YouTube. Collectively these clips have garnered thousands of views, but the video that has truly taken the web by storm this week is a satirical response from a Saudi comedian.26-year-old Hisham Fageeh uploaded a parody version of the Bob Marley classic, ‘No Woman, No Cry’, to YouTube, managing to clock up over 7 million views and counting in just 4 days. The lyrics include such lines as “ovaries all safe and well, so you can make lots and lots of babies” and “hey little sister, don’t touch that wheel… your feet is your only carriage”. Fageeh himself refused to comment on his opinions on the law, referring to himself as simply a comedian not a political activist, but the topical relevance of the clip has generated huge amount of media interest, sending it straight to the top of our most shared YouTube videos this week.

Also trending... The best kid's halloween costume i've seen (EVER); a super emotional baby’s adorable tearful reaction to his mothers singing; a hilarious Sesame Street parody of Homeland; and a brilliant underwater stop motion animation by PES.Oh, and probably the weirdest video you’ve seen all week…

Squeak of the Week: Baby ducklings on a water slide – need I say more?!

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