Due to the immersive, interactive nature of the campaign - which required our audience to solve a puzzle in the real world in order to redeem it as a promo code on the Uber Eats app - we knew Horror Codes would only be as successful as the 360 brand experience we created using strategically placed OOH. Each stage of the consumer journey in the 10 days leading up to Halloween was carefully constructed to reach our audience in the most relevant contexts in order to entice and drive conversions for Uber Eats’ most successful grocery & retail campaign ever.

After taking a hit during the global pandemic, Halloween spending for Americans is back and better than ever. As one of the largest American holidays, Americans spend over $12 billion getting ready for the big celebration - with nearly three quarters of the entire American population handing out candy on Halloween. And with a 17% increase in spend over the last five years, it’s one of the top 3 biggest occasions for candy sales in the country, garnering over $3 billion on candy alone.

Uber Eats - known for on-demand restaurant delivery - was looking for opportunities to grow awareness and trial of its New Verticals: grocery, convenience, and retail. With New Verticals as a priority growth opportunity, Halloween was the perfect occasion to capture a high-intent consumer moment for candy while building awareness and trial for Uber Eats’ lagging offering.

Moreover, Uber Eats has real cultural cachet in the entertainment world; the brand has shown the lengths it will go to for a captivating story and unignorable creative. Promo codes are also an integral part of their business around holidays like Halloween. But the codes are rarely noticeable…and never terrifying. Until now.

When most Americans thought of Uber Eats, they thought of restaurant delivery. Grocery and Retail were not top of mind, so we needed the perfect opportunity to grow awareness of this New Vertical.

And that meant we were missing out on one of the biggest grocery occasions in the country; each Halloween, Americans spend over $3 billion on Halloween candy, making it the perfect opportunity to capture a high-intent moment while building awareness and trial across Uber Eats’ lagging vertical.

So how could Uber Eats stand out during this cultural moment and get more people to try their grocery and retail delivery service?

Knowing that candy shopping begins in the weeks leading up to Halloween, we needed a big idea that kept our audience’s attention engaged over an extended period, reached them when and where they made their purchase decision, and stood out amongst a sea of digital retail competitors.

Each Halloween, retailers fight it out using promo codes like SPOOKY10. How could we make these forgettable, commerce-driven promo codes more terrifying, entertaining, and worthy of the holiday?

Introducing Horror Codes. By partnering with 4 Hollywood studios, we got the IP to the 10 greatest horror films ever. We took their most famous quotes - from The Sixth Sense’s “I see dead people” to SAW’s “Do you want to play a game?” - and turned the full length quotes into promo codes for candy.

We built momentum by dropping a fresh quote, seamlessly integrated across non-digital, digital, and social media placements, on each day leading up to Halloween. But, there was a catch. We put horror fans to the test by dropping the quotes with the majority of letters removed; only once the full puzzle solved could it be used to unlock a 60% discount for candy.

Halloween and horror serve as entertainment that creates an alternate world; it just takes one off-theme detail to break the illusion. But all too often, brands trying to cash in forget that the devil is in the details and go to market with an incomplete and disappointing brand experience.

Our strategy was to make a promo code as memorable and relevant to Halloween as possible, breaking through in culture as a brand that truly understands horror. We gamified intellectual property that not only true horror superfans, but also casual horror watchers, care about and know - treating our target more like an audience than consumers.

We chose high-impact OOH to truly make waves in culture and reach audiences in contextual, yet unexpected, moments. This way, our audience could band together to crack the codes, never ignoring a single one…and we’d put our competitors in their graves.

We dropped a fresh Horror Code quote, integrated across multiple media placements, on each day leading up to Halloween.

We threaded our brand story into culture by dropping them everywhere from transit, to digital OOH, to social, to online horror communities, and to CRM and push notifications. We even dropped codes in the Uber Mobility app and Uber drivers’ in-car tablets for riders to pass the time with a code. Our audience’s brand experience became as entertaining and cinematic as the horror films themselves.

It didn’t stop there. While other retailers begged people to remember their promo codes, we had fans actively playing along with us by going out to search for codes in OOH - and then, discussing them online. We engaged with them on X (Twitter), TikTok, and Instagram to encourage and celebrate their sleuthing skills, driving them in-app to complete the final stage of their transactional journey.

In less than 8 hours, we got 290,000 promo code applications, and by Halloween night, over 2 million.

Overall, Horror Codes brought in 44% New Users to Ubers Eats’ Grocery & Retail vertical. And not only did we see a +65% lift in users’ grocery + retail basket size over the campaign period, but the campaign yielded a 57% post-Halloween retention rate from participants as well.

While other retailers begged people to remember and use their promo codes, Uber Eats’ immersive brand experience had people discussing and sharing theirs online - garnering over 10,000 organic social engagements and over 96.3 million impressions on Uber ad surfaces.

We turned the most boring marketing trick into an unforgettable Halloween Treat, giving Uber Eats the most successful promo code campaign for Uber Eats Grocery & Retail ever, in the total history of the company.