This week, the month of October officially started! As if it wasn’t obvious. Pumpkin is everywhere, Boxcar Brewing Company’s Halloween Ride the Rails events are getting closer, Halloween was trending on Twitter almost every day this week and Halloween articles are popping up everywhere. Odds were in our favor to pull some of these Halloween articles for our recap of the week’s marketing news...there were a lot of great videos this week too.
“Amok, Amok, Amok!”
This week, Mashable took a look at some of your favorite Halloween Movies from childhood from a fresh adult perspective. We all love Hocus Pocus, even as adults, but they make some compelling arguments. Was Danny from Hocus Pocus a child to be admired or a kid with the worst Halloween ever? Was Casper, “the friendly ghost”, a hopeless romantic or a creepy possessive stalker?
Halloween Masks: Scaring you into Quitting Smoking
Who says fear campaigns can’t work? HealthExpress, a U.K.-based online clinic has launched a Stop Smoking Campaign called “Stoptober” in which they hired actors to walk around the streets wearing Halloween-like masks that show the long term effects of smoking, reports the Daily Mail. They showed mouth cancer, throat cancer, cataracts, premature aging, etc. and they definitely freaked people out. Is it enough to scare people into quitting smoking? Maybe. Would it work on you?
Kanye + Dancing + Quitting = Viral Video
Kanye can help me quit my job! That’s probably what Marina Shifrin was thinking when she conceptualized this dance video to quit her job at a Taiwanese video company. Her YouTube quitting video has over 13 million views.
Then, the company retaliated with their own dance video defending the company. It didn’t go over as well but it still has over 3 million views.
Every Soldier Needs a Galloping Robot Animal
Boston Dynamic developed a large four-legged robot that can run 16 miles per hour. The project was created from money from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Watch out soldiers, you may have a new sidekick.
Oreos Across the World
When you’ve got a great commercial concept why change it from country to country? Oreo didn’t. They have repeated the same exact commercial in many countries with different actors (in one country they replaced the dad character with a dog). The commercial centers around a young girl explaining to her father (or dog) how to eat an Oreo the right way, here is one example from South Africa.
Dear JJ Abrams, Don’t Mess up Star Wars
A Portland ad agency has garnered over 700,000 views on YouTube for putting together a video directed towards JJ Abrams. The video details the 4 rules for making Star Wars great again. There is also a website that goes along with the video begging him…”for the love of all that is holy. Don’t mess this up!”
