All treats, no tricks, here’s a roundup of some of the best content marketing efforts that caught my eye this Halloween.
Zombie survival skills
Outdoor lifestyle brand, Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is no stranger to great content marketing. This Halloween inspired ‘13 essential tools for surviving a zombie outbreak’ infographic is no exception.
The combination of great illustration, humour, and some subtle product placements makes this simple piece of content an all-round winner in my eyes.
With product descriptions like; ‘Mini playing cards: Great for playing poker with fellow survivors. When your friends are gone, there’s always solitaire’, there’s nothing not to love about this.
Wine and candy pairing guide
For the second year running, wine community app, Vivino, published a handy guide to matching candy (that’s “sweets” to you and me) with wine. I love that the company has actually taken the time to think about the best wine-candy combos and even added some very convincing tasting notes from its in-house wine experts.
“M&MS + Port. The dark, sweet, black fig and dried fruit character of Port is a great counterpoint to the milk chocolate in M&Ms. The hard crunch of the candy shell is perfect with the soft pillow of lavishly textured Port.”
Well I know what I’m doing tonight and it involves a bottle of port and a massive bag of M&Ms.
Spurs vs Zombies
As an avid football fan and digital marketing bod I have always been interested in how football clubs are harnessing digital channels to boost fan engagement. Manchester City is one of the clubs leading the way in this regard, but there are plenty of small clubs getting in on the act too.
Take Spurs, for example. This ‘Spurs vs Zombies’ video may not offer much to get excited about from a production point of view, but as far as reactive video content goes, it ticks the right boxes.
Get the dungeon look
In what seems like one of the most unlikely brand partnerships in marketing history, the London Dungeons enlisted the help of M.A.C Cosmetics to add some additional ‘Urgh’ factor to its actors’ makeup this Halloween.
Bolstered by a tongue in cheek video tutorial, downloadable makeup guides and a campaign hashtag, this had all the makings of an excellent campaign. However, if engagement with the hashtag is anything to go by then it didn’t quite take off from a social perspective. A for effort.
Sleeping with the dead
I’m breaking all the rules here as this example is from 2015 and isn’t strictly ‘content’, but it’s a good’un so worthy of another mention.
Accommodation rental website Airbnb ran a competition to offer two brave travellers a night in one of Paris’s most popular and terrifying tourist attractions, the Paris Catacombs.
According to ‘sources’, Airbnb paid up to 350,000 euros to privatise the tunnels for the event, but based on the coverage the company obtained as a result, it feels like money well spent. You can check out all the details here.
