For this week’s AdMiration feature, we looked at consumer response to Fanta’s Halloween Reveal ad — the launch film for Fanta’s Haunted Universe, the brand’s first original Halloween world and its bid to own the season the way Coca-Cola owns Christmas.
Read on to get our 3-2-1 snapshot of the ad (3 facts, 2 learnings and 1 reflection) and learn how their ad was received based on our data.
The ad opens on Fanta’s signature orange and the logo, then takes us straight inside a Fanta production line. The drink runs through pipes and tanks, cans fill up under warm orange light and the whole thing looks less like soda being made than something supernatural being brewed. Then things take a turn and we’re out on the road — a Fanta truck driving through a dark misty forest at night, heading straight for a black portal opening up ahead of it.
What follows introduces Fanta’s four original monsters one by one. The vampire who fronts Fanta Pineapple grins into the camera, with his white hair and his eyes glowing orange. The werewolf from the Strawberry can is behind the decks, playing a set against an enormous orange moon. Then we meet the bionic Frankenstein’s monster engraving the Fanta logo into his own mechanical hand. And in the woods, the jack-o’-lantern-headed scarecrow from the Orange can rises out of the roots, with his carved face lit from inside.
Then they all come for the truck. The motorcycle pulls alongside the trailer, the vampire flies at it, the scarecrow lands on the roof and the chase runs through smoke and orange light on a wet road — until we see who’s driving. Ghost Face is at the wheel, drinking a Ghost Face Punch.
The ad closes back on bright orange, with two pumpkin-headed monsters carrying a box of the limited-edition range, before the “Wanta Fanta?” tagline lands alongside the Paramount+ and Scream logos.
Make your branding part of the story. An impressive 87% of people remembered Fanta after watching (Unaided Brand Recall: 87% vs. 70% norm) — and that’s because the brand is engraved into the story itself, quite literally in the case of the bionic monster carving the Fanta logo into his own metal hand.
And the brand’s orange color sits at the center of it all. It’s the color the whole world is made of: the liquid pouring through the factory, the truck, the moon the werewolf DJs under, the vampire’s glowing eyes. When we asked people what made them think this was a Fanta ad, that’s what they described: “Well, the color orange was predominantly featured not only in the images of the cans that the various characters were drinking from, but in the lettering of the brand, and the overall lighting of the commercial.”
And it’s worth thinking about for any brand building a story world, because an original world is a great opportunity to build something that immediately cues the brand.
It’s not about whether you use AI. It’s about how you use it. There’s a lot of noise right now about AI in advertising, and this ad is a good test of what consumers make of it. Almost half (46%) say the thought of AI being used has no impact on how they feel, and 36% say it actually makes them feel more positive, against 18% who say more negative.
But the more interesting finding is how much people admired the result and weren’t really concerned with the tech behind it. As one respondent put it: “The ad was movie quality.”
The real question is whether you’re putting the same idea, effort and production standards behind an AI-made ad that you’d put behind anything else. People can’t always tell us how an ad was made, but they can always tell us whether it was made well, whether it looks good and whether it makes them feel something.
Could your brand own a holiday?
Most brands treat seasonal moments as something to show up for — a Halloween ad in October, a Christmas ad in December and then back to business as usual. Fanta is trying to own the season outright and they want to mirror what Coca-Cola has done with Christmas. And it’s a masterclass in how to go about it.
They own the cast, so the characters can return every October. They’ve flipped the licensing, so Ghost Face visits Fanta’s world rather than Fanta visiting his. And they’ve built the world beyond the ad, across a live factory experience, collectible packs and retail.
Fanta has been building towards this for a while and the association is clearly there. Over half (55%) of people say Fanta feels like a brand that belongs with Halloween. And “a brand I associate with Halloween” now sits right alongside Fanta’s core associations (44%), just behind “fun and playful” (52%), “great taste” (49%) and “full of flavor” (46%).
So it’s worth asking: which moment in the year already has something of your brand in it that you’ve been treating as a campaign rather than something to build and own? Owning a moment or occasion is an extension of your category entry points. Christmas is crowded — every brand shows up, and most of them get lost in it. The opportunity is usually somewhere quieter: a moment fewer brands have claimed, where showing up consistently for a few years is enough to own it.
Fanta has spent the last few years becoming a Halloween brand. In 2024 it partnered with Warner Bros. on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, putting Michael Keaton, Jenna Ortega and Winona Ryder on cans under the line “Summon What You Wanta.”
In 2025 it went bigger, teaming up with Universal Pictures and Blumhouse to bring Chucky, M3gan, Freddy Fazbear and The Grabber together on limited-edition packs for the first time, alongside a new berry flavor, Fanta Chucky Punch.
This year Fanta has done something different. Launched in August with a cinematic trailer and rolled out across 50 markets two days later, Fanta’s Haunted Universe is the brand’s first original Halloween entertainment world — four characters Fanta invented itself, each with their own collectible can.
The ambition behind it is to own Halloween the way Coca-Cola owns Christmas — characters that come back every October the way Santa does every December. Ibrahim Khan, Fanta’s global VP of marketing, calls it the brand’s “move from collaborators to creators, building original characters and stories designed to grow beyond a single season.”
The licensing hasn’t stopped though. This year Ghost Face — the masked killer from Scream — becomes the first guest character to enter Fanta’s Haunted Universe, through a partnership with Fun World and Paramount+. It's a subtle but important switch: in 2024 and 2025, Fanta was a guest in someone else’s world. Now the borrowed characters are guests in Fanta’s.
This ad is the film that introduces all of this. It’s also the part of the campaign that's drawn the most attention, because the Haunted Universe was developed with GRAiL, an AI-powered entertainment studio. Khan has pushed back on the idea that this has been a shortcut: “Some people think you press a few buttons and Fanta Universe pops up — it’s taken us a year and a half.”
He compares AI’s role to the shift from hand-drawn animation to CGI — a change in how the work gets made, not a replacement for making it.
Beyond the film, the campaign runs across collectible packaging, the returning Haunted Fanta Factory experience, creator content and retail activation.
Fanta has landed a spot sitting in the top quarter of US ads for its potential to drive short-term sales and the top third for building brand equity over the longer term (Sales Impact: 77; Brand Impact: 69).
The ad is much more distinctive than the average US ad (Ad Distinctiveness: 4.2 vs. 3.7 norm), it grabs attention (Claimed Attention: 4.2 vs. 3.9 norm) and it reads as an ad only Fanta could have made (Uniqueness of Brand Impressions: 4.1 vs. 3.9 norm).
What’s more, people walk away remembering whose ad it was, with an impressive 87% of them naming Fanta after watching the ad (Unaided Brand Recall: 87% vs. 70% norm).
There’s no frame in the entire ad that doesn’t have a distinctive brand asset present. When we asked what made them think this was an ad for Fanta, the orange color comes up very prominently and as part of the whole atmosphere — it’s the moon, the vampire’s eyes, the liquid, the truck, the lighting:
The Haunted Fanta Factory is also an asset in its own right. It ran as a live horror experience in New York and in London last year and it’s returning this year:
Love is the dominant emotion at almost every single second of this ad (Love: 35% vs. 27% norm). It climbs immediately as we land inside the factory and watch the drink being made.
There’s also an element of surprise as the portal opens and the truck disappears into it. The visual effects work hard to keep the attention going and so does the soundtrack — Wolfmother’s “Joker and the Thief” driving the chase.
Musical Appeal comes in at 4.2 (vs. 3.8 norm) and the music is one of the most mentioned things people liked about the ad:
For all that Love, though, we’ve also got a strong Dislike score (7% vs. 2% norm) — indicating that this ad is a bit polarizing.
Two things are dividing people here — horror and AI. The ad resonates a lot to the people who like horror and Halloween:
And for the people who don’t, the reason they give is the genre itself rather than anything about the execution: “I'm not a fan of Halloween, so that turns me off a bit.”
This ad was made with AI and Fanta has been very open about it — and some viewers clearly noticed, with a small group naming it as the thing they disliked.
But that’s not what most people came away talking about. The praise is mostly about effort and quality, and none of it is framed around how the ad was made:
We also asked viewers whether the fact that AI has been used to make this ad change how they feel about it. Almost half (46%) say it has no impact on how they feel and 36% say it makes them feel more positive.
What people praised the most is the effort and investment that went into the ad. And since they liked the result, most were not turned off by the usage of AI in the development of the ad.
Ultimately, all this translates into how people perceive the brand and its ambition to own Halloween. We asked viewers how much Fanta feels like a brand that belongs with Halloween after watching. Over half (55%) say “a lot” or “a great deal,” with only 8% saying “not at all.”
It shows up in what people take away about the brand too, with “a brand I associate with Halloween" picked by 44% of viewers — sitting alongside what Fanta already stands for: being fun and playful (52%), having great taste (49%) and being full of flavor (46%).
Fanta has built a whole spooky world here and it’s paying off — the branding is inseparable from the story and the Halloween association is already landing with people. It’s also a useful reminder that consumers judge the craft, not the tools behind it.
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