In my search for great Halloween campaigns, I came across one that was so creative and unexpected that I had to dig into it, even though it debuted last year. Halloween themed marketing campaigns prove to be not just for candy and costumes, as digital-realtor Trulia ran a successful campaign with several different pieces.
Trulia created a haunted open-house prank video for Youtube that brought in over 56,267 views. They rigged a house with all sorts of scary things like creepy dolls, a sewing machine that starts itself, and candles that light themselves and let the cameras roll as they showed potential homebuyers the house. The woman showing the house claims it’s “not for everyone” before the home tour, and as these couples tour the home they find out why! The video is 3 and a half minutes long and shows clips of the spooky happenings in the house, and at the end it shows the ultimate surprise when the truth is revealed in one of two ways. Perhaps the best part of the entire video isn’t the video itself, but the tag line “Home searching so easy, it’s kinda scary.”
The Halloween fun doesn’t stop there, as Trulia put “Unnatural Hazard Maps” on their website that show zombie infestations, ghost sightings, and vampire bites. They then promoted the map via Twitter with posts such as “Are your brains in danger? Our zombie locator map can help protect you from the undead…or run towards them,” followed by the hashtag #nomnom.
Trulia also made a Housing Scare Report infographic with spooky home scenarios to scare prospective homebuyers. Although the font in the information tabs coming off of the haunted house is a few sizes to small, the overall design is aesthetically pleasing. My favorite tab of information is probably the bottom tab claiming that 54% of prospective homebuyers would buy near a cemetery assuming everything else match their needs. When reading that, the first thing I thought was, yeah, I probably would buy a home near a cemetery as long as it wasn’t directly next to my house or across the street. My second thought was that living near a cemetery would be a good way to scare your kids straight with threats of the dead rising and coming for them if they don’t behave.
I was thoroughly impressed that they had multiple tactics of the campaign in order to target more people. Overall, Trulia was very strategic in finding a way to integrate Halloween into a campaign using the idea of haunted houses.