Want to know how to end Halloween on a high note? A trip to Transylvania, Romania might just do the trick — and that's exactly what this year's Flying Fish Halloween campaign had on offer.
An enticing contest like the above tied to a seasonal campaign can generate excitement and extend a brand's reach. Brands today are not just competing on taste and price, they need a place in people's plans and their group chats, forming part of lasting memories.
Leading the thinking behind this is Candice van den Bosch, Brand Director of the Beyond Beer category at AB InBev Africa. With 15 years of experience at AB InBev Africa, van den Bosch offers us insight into what it takes to turn a bold idea into a campaign people can't stop talking about.
The Flying Fish Halloween campaign starts online with influencers and interactive mysteries, but culminates in a physical trip to Transylvania, Romania. While brands in this category tend to rely on massive media buys or festival sponsorships, you opted for a hyper-specific, narrative-driven experiential route. Why take this approach, and how does a narrative like this help Flying Fish steal market share from traditional competitors?
We don't see experience and reach as opposing choices. The media gives the campaign scale, but the story gives people a reason to care, participate and keep following.
Flying Fish has always stood for putting an unexpected twist on the familiar, so we wanted the campaign itself to behave in that way. Rather than simply telling people that we had launched a Halloween limited edition, we created a mystery that unfolded over time.
It began with strange sightings, moving fridges and bitten cans in South African stores, before revealing that Dracula had arrived in search of the new Flying Fish Halloween Limited Edition Passion Fruit & Lemon. Consumers could then follow the story all the way to a Halloween experience at Dracula's Castle in Transylvania.
That progression matters because it turns the consumer from a passive viewer into a participant. Each part of the campaign offers a different way in: discover the mystery, taste the product, enter the competition, attend our local Halloween experience or follow the journey to Transylvania. Our communication strategy was deliberately structured to move people from speculation, to engagement, to participation.
Traditional beer brands are incredibly established, so we are not going to out-tradition them. Flying Fish needs to win by being more distinctive, more culturally relevant and more open to participation.
A story creates multiple moments of attention around one platform. More importantly, it gives people something worth retelling. That is how a brand moves beyond merely appearing in culture and starts contributing to it.
AB InBev is a massive global organisation. To execute rapid, multi-layered campaigns like the Dracula mystery hunt, how do you, as Brand Director, foster a culture of creative agility and fast decision-making within a structured corporate environment?
In a large organisation like AB-INBEV, agility does not come from having fewer processes. It comes from establishing clarity early enough that the right decisions can be made quickly.
For a campaign of this scale, the first job is to ensure that every partner understands the same strategic idea, the role their channel plays and the non-negotiables of the brand. On Halloween, that meant aligning teams around a clear journey: create curiosity, drive participation and then amplify the experiences to build future desire.
It also meant being very clear that the limited-edition product was the primary story, with the chance to experience Dracula's Castle providing an extraordinary reason to participate.
The second part is creating a working culture in which information moves quickly. We had brand, creative, social, media, PR, trade, promotions, legal and global teams working across different parts of the campaign. Regular cross-functional sessions, clear owners and consolidated plans allowed us to resolve issues without repeatedly reopening the whole strategy.
The reality is that campaigns change. Talent changes, regulations evolve, assets need to be adapted and opportunities emerge that were not in the original plan. Creative agility is not pretending that those things will not happen. It is giving teams enough strategic certainty to adapt the execution without losing the idea.
My role is therefore to keep everyone anchored to the consumer and the brand, remove ambiguity where I can, and empower the people closest to each workstream to make decisions. You cannot personally control every detail of a campaign this layered. You have to create a shared standard for what "good" looks like, and then trust the team to deliver against it.
Consumer trends indicate a growing interest in alternatives to traditional beer — like seltzers, zero-alcohol variants and lighter spritzers — causing the 'Beyond Beer' category to steadily expand. From a portfolio management perspective, how do you capture this health-conscious, new-age consumer without losing SAB's core, legacy beer drinkers?
I would challenge the idea that growth in Beyond Beer has to come at the expense of traditional beer. Consumers do not necessarily live within one beverage category. Their choices change according to the occasion, the people they are with, the flavour they want and the kind of experience they are looking for.
Our role in portfolio management is therefore not to force one product to answer every need. It is to understand where conventional beer is already strong, and where consumers are looking for something different. Beyond Beer gives us the ability to compete in those adjacent occasions with products that may be more flavour-led, lighter in taste or simply feel more suited to a particular social setting.
You've led cause-driven work like Brutal Fruit's ‘SheBeen' and now high-energy entertainment with Flying Fish. How do you believe a modern brand should decide when to comment on societal issues versus when to simply entertain their audience — or is there a completely different approach to this creative decision-making process?
I don't believe the decision begins with, "Should the brand take a stand or should it entertain?" It begins with, "What role has this brand genuinely earned the right to play in people's lives?"
Purpose and entertainment can both be powerful, but neither should be treated as a marketing format.
A societal issue should never become a convenient way for a brand to appear relevant. The brand needs a credible connection to the subject, a clear understanding of the communities involved and a willingness to contribute through action, not only communication.
Equally, entertainment should not be dismissed as superficial. People live with real pressure and constant demands on their attention. Creating a moment of escape, connection, curiosity or joy can be a meaningful role for a brand, provided it is rooted in what the brand stands for.
So the test is not whether purpose is better than entertainment. The test is authenticity. Does the idea come from the brand's role? Is it useful or enjoyable for the audience? Can the brand deliver it credibly? If the answer is yes, the work has a much better chance of creating real value.
There can be pressure on marketers to demonstrate relatively quick ROIs from campaigns. How do you make the case internally for ideas whose value lies in building brand memory and consumer participation over time instead of an immediate conversion?
The first thing is not to position long-term brand building and short-term commercial delivery as an either-or decision. Strong platforms should be designed to create both, even though the results will become visible over different time horizons.
With a campaign like Halloween, we can measure the immediate behaviours: awareness of the limited edition, engagement with the content, competition participation, product trial, event participation and the quality of execution in trade. The campaign was built with distinct roles for media, creators, promotions, retail, local experiences and the Transylvania finale, rather than relying on one exposure to do everything.
But we also need to measure whether the campaign is strengthening something more enduring. Do consumers increasingly associate Flying Fish with Halloween? Does the brand become more distinctive during the occasion? Are people anticipating what we will do next? Can we build the platform again with stronger recognition and participation?
Our future planning already reflects that ambition: to make Flying Fish South Africa's most anticipated Halloween brand, rather than treating Halloween as a once-off activation.
The internal case becomes stronger when the long-term ambition is accompanied by a clear learning agenda. We need to know what we are testing, which behaviours indicate progress and what evidence would justify scaling the idea. That means looking beyond one final ROI number and examining the contribution of product, media, trial, participation, culture and brand memory together.
A brand platform compounds when it is repeated with discipline.
If we reinvent everything every year, we repeatedly pay to teach consumers a new story. If we build recognisable assets and behaviours over time, each execution can benefit from the memory created by the previous one. That is when an occasion starts becoming an ownable part of the brand.
Sponsorship is a lot more than simply placing a logo on an existing property. What exactly do you look for before deciding that a sponsorship can become a genuine extension of the brand and not just another media placement?
The starting point is whether the property gives the brand permission to do something meaningful, not simply whether it offers visibility.
I look at four things. First, is there a genuine connection between the property, the consumer and the brand's role? Second, can we improve the experience in a way that people would notice if the brand were absent? Third, does the property allow for participation and content beyond the event itself? And finally, can the association become distinctive and repeatable, or will we simply look like one of many sponsors?
For Flying Fish, the strongest opportunities are those that allow us to introduce an unexpected twist to an experience people already value. That might mean changing how people discover the event, creating a side experience nobody anticipated, giving consumers an active role, or finding a surprising way for the product and occasion to connect.
Did you find this Q&A insightful? Let us know in the comments section below.
*Image courtesy of contributor and Canva