Celebrating Halloween with Out of Home Advertising
October 31, 2024
Few holidays dominate the cultural conversation every year like Halloween. From costume shops to haunted hayrides, the celebration represents peak season for plenty of brands and local businesses. But you don’t need to be a Halloween-related advertiser to enter the contextual relevance chat!
Let’s put the OOH back in “boo.” Here are a few standout Halloween 2024 out of home advertising campaigns.
Let’s start with Spotify. The streamer used traditional static and digital transit and billboard media to promote its spine-tingling selection of audiobooks.
If you prefer concerts to streaming, Live Nation used our Liveboards to promote Duran Duran’s Danse Macabre Halloween Party at Madison Square Garden, an annual tradition where the New Wave icons play themed covers and darkly reimagined versions of their classics.
Do you like scary movies? Smile 2 was this year’s hot Halloween-season horror flick, opening at number one thanks in part to ads like this Digital Urban Panel.
When it comes to seasonal Halloween attractions, Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights is the 800-pound gorilla, using digital out of home and traditional billboards in Los Angeles and Orlando. (Although 800-pound gorillas are not among this year’s monsters.)
Some Halloween attractions like HHN rely on intellectual property for scares – but others are frightening enough just based on where they are. Take, for example, the Halloween Nights event at Eastern State Penitentiary. This is the second consecutive year they’ve driven footfall with our Philadelphia-area billboards.
Just outside nearby Lancaster, the Field of Screams attraction is another repeat advertiser. Last year, we helped them increase visitation by 15% and documented it in a case study.
ZooTampa promotes its annual Halloween offering event with traffic-stopping creative featuring clever billboard extensions and classic sci-fi style.
We would be remiss if we didn’t share this incredible shot of a billboard in Cleveland for haunted attraction Fear Forest. (The lightning was a paid actor.)
There are haunted houses… and then there’s Salem, Massachusetts. The town best known for the 1692 witch trials presented special programming all month long for those souls brave enough to make the trip. To encourage visitation, the town’s Peabody Essex Museum launched a campaign on Boston transit featuring QRad, our interactive content control capability, which allowed would-be visitors to preview the exhibit that appeals most to them.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Halloween without Spirit Halloween. From coast to coast, the infinitely memeable retailer’s scary creative looms menacingly over potential future locations.
Let’s give it up for the kings of context, Dunkin’. The OAAA Hall of Famer’s “Sharing Is Scaring” campaign ran nationwide on our digital screens.
But you don’t need to sell spider-shaper merchandise to achieve contextual relevance. Phoenix law firm Lerner & Rowe executed it flawlessly with this batty DOOH campaign.
Speaking of digital out of home, it’s a perfect way to communicate current deals to your customers with dynamic creative – which is exactly what Meijer is doing here.
Finally, OUTFRONT proudly partnered with Shriners Children’s Hospital this month in support of its fifth annual Boston Haunted Walk event, promoted on Boston billboard and transit advertising formats including digital bulletins, subway interior cards, and Liveboards. The walk included games, raffles, snacks, face painting, and a costume contest, with proceeds supporting pediatric burn care, reconstructive plastic surgery, and cleft lip and palate care at the hospital.
Happy Halloween from all of us at OUTFRONT!
Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Manager @ OUTFRONT
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