After doing tie-ins with iconic scary movie characters like Chucky and M3gan, Coca-Cola's Fanta wants to make some spooky personas of its own.
Ahead of Halloween, the soda brand is introducing four characters as part of a kickoff to what it's calling Fanta's Haunted Universe, which it describes as a collection of products, content, and experiences.
Over the next three months, there will be soda cans featuring the characters, rewards fans can collect, and live experiences that expand on the brand's Haunted Fanta Factory, which it built last year to attract horror fans.
Fanta worked with the AI entertainment studio GRAiL to create the characters, which resemble familiar figures like Frankenstein's monster and vampires, but with their own designs and backstories. They're being introduced in a horror-movie-style trailer that goes live on Monday. It features menacing jack-o'-lanterns going on a rampage through city streets, a DJing werewolf, and two onlookers enjoying the scene over — what else — a can of Fanta.
"We want Halloween to be an enduring platform for Fanta, just like how we had Christmas for Coke," Ibrahim Khan, global VP of marketing at Fanta, told Business Insider. "We want to be able to give a consistent experience to consumers, one that we can grow year on year on year for many, many Halloweens to come. And in order to do that, it almost necessitated that we would start world-building of our own."
It's another example of brands seeking to become media companies and entertainers in their own right, as marketers shift budgets away from traditional media like TV.
Khan said Fanta will still use TV ads as a small part of the mix, but that the brand has stopped using TV altogether in some places in the US and China as it prioritizes social content that fans can riff on.
"Brands don't hold the mic anymore. Our audiences do. It creates a lot of pressure for us, but it's also nice to be able to then push the boundaries," he said.
Fanta is following a familiar playbook
Fanta is following a similar playbook to the likes of Lego and Barbie, whose toys have become stars of narrative movies, or P&G's Charmin, whose bear mascot has become a recognizable character separate from its product.
Khan said he now refers to Fanta as an entertainment brand. That doesn't mean it's going to open a movie studio (although he said it's possible a movie could come in the future) but rather that it's a fun brand whose natural way to connect with Gen Z is through entertainment.
Khan pointed to high social media engagement around Fanta and Halloween, and to themed soda products selling out weeks before the holiday, as examples of how the brand had become an established part of Halloween tradition.
Already, one fan account got more than 400,000 views on X for its post anticipating Fanta's Halloween rollout. Fanta's social media mentions spiked more than 500% that day, according to the analytics firm Sprout Social.
"Fans are asking, what is Fanta going to do next Halloween?" Khan said. "When we see engagement like that and the impact it has on the brand and the business, that's what tells us that we need to invest behind something that is more long-term."
Whether Fanta's own characters can perform as well as familiar ones like Chucky remains to be seen. Fanta also isn't abandoning Hollywood IP. Khan said a known character from pop culture, which he wouldn't identify, would also join this year's campaign.
"It's not that we're going to be exclusively creators now," he said. "The exciting part of what we're trying to do is that we're trying to combine the two."