Fanta Wants to Own Halloween the Way Coke Owns Christmas
Updated: 4 hours ago
Fanta has spent eighteen months building its own cast of original monsters — a Haunted Universe — to turn Halloween into a platform it owns for years, not a seasonal campaign it reruns. Its stated ambition, in its marketing chief's words: what Christmas is to Coke is what Halloween should be for Fanta.
From borrowing fame to building it
For years, Fanta's Halloween meant licensed horror icons on the can — Chucky, Michael Myers, Beetlejuice. Borrowed fame is fast: it rents an audience that already exists. But you do not own it, you pay for it every year, and it never becomes yours. This year Fanta flipped the model, launching original characters — a jack-o-lantern scarecrow, a vampire, a cyborg Frankenstein, a werewolf DJ — with their own lore, trailer and world, rolled out across more than 50 markets.
The results it has shared are eye-catching: Fanta says its 2025 Halloween effort drew around 10 billion impressions, much of it fan-made, and the new universe is designed to compound that each year.
Why owning IP beats renting it
The strategic point is simple and widely ignored. When you license someone else's character, the equity flows to them. When you build your own, every impression, meme and piece of fan content deposits into an asset you keep. Coca-Cola's festive truck is the template: decades of consistent, owned imagery that now does the work for free because audiences expect it. Fanta is trying to manufacture the same compounding effect around a different holiday.
What this means for your business
Most businesses cannot fund a monster cinematic universe — but the logic scales down. The question is whether your seasonal and campaign spending builds an asset or just rents attention. A mascot, a recurring character, a signature format, a named annual event: these are cheap to start and appreciate with repetition. A different stunt every quarter, or a borrowed celebrity each campaign, resets you to zero every time.
The test is ownership. If you stopped paying tomorrow, what would still be yours? Fanta's old answer was nothing — it rented Chucky. Now it is building something it keeps. Most brands never ask the question.
The difference between marketing that compounds and marketing that evaporates is ownership. Borrowed fame gives you a spike and a bill; owned IP gives you an asset that works harder every year you invest in it. Fanta spent eighteen months building its own monsters precisely because it was tired of renting someone else's. That instinct is right for a business of any size. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
Borrowed fame rents you an audience; owned IP builds you an asset. Ask what would still be yours if you stopped paying — and build that.
Does your marketing spend leave you with an asset you own, or just a receipt for attention you rented?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: Marketing Dive, Adweek, eMarketer.
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
