Halloween is scary. Owning a home shouldn’t be.

Gerry the ghoul (heavy ‘j’) just bought the house he used to haunt… and with all these home projects, he’s beginning to think it was a mistake.

Performance metrics:

• Video 1 - clocks in at the highest viewed video on Thumbtack to date with over 8% engagement rate, and 20k impressions in less than 24 hours without boosting. Record number of shares and top performing boosted post.
  Video 2 - saw over 9% engagement rate.

• TikTok paid media saw a +121% video completion rate and +80% average watch time compared to business as usual ads.

The first time I saw Clayton Farris on Instagram, I snort-laughed and sent his videos to all my favorite people. Fast forward to concepting for the Halloween campaign with Thumbtack and Clayton was the first creator that came to mind.

We had a small budget for the campaign, but in true form, we wanted to squeeze as much as we could out of it. We didn’t have enough money to shoot our own creative in-house, so what were we to do?

I pitched Clayton as a way to avoid the cost of shooting in house while working with a content creator who just gets social. He does amazing characters and I knew we could create something spooky (and hilarious) with him.

Enter: Gerry the Ghoul.

Gerry was by far one of our most loved campaigns internally and the comments on Instagram prove that when you give people value (in this case, many many chuckles), they love being sold to.

But wait, there’s more…

Besides Gerry, we also brought haunted vibes to the homeowner experience through a partnership with everyone’s favorite vampire slayer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who took calls from people who can’t tell if their house is haunted… or just in need of a pro. This part of the campaign drove a +5% in brand awareness for our target customer.

We also partnered with a claymation creator to develop a Huluween ad spot which drove revenue that exceeded project targets by 32%.