Haunted Mansion
View the case- Brand
- Fanta
- Year
- 2023
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- UNIT9
- With
- Coca-Cola
- With
- Studio X EU
Objective
Halloween is Fanta's biggest seasonal moment, and in 2022 the brand could only offer it to a handful of influencers who got into a real haunted house. For 2023, Fanta wanted to open that house to everyone, using it to pull young audiences into the Coca-Cola app during October, grow app engagement and first-party data, and do it at once across dozens of markets without paying for local adaptation.
Solution
The experience opens inside the Coca-Cola app with the player standing at the door of a haunted mansion. Stepping inside drops them into a 360° panorama of each room — hallway, kitchen, dining room, conservatory — which they look around by tilting their phone or, without gyroscope access, dragging a finger across the screen. There's no walking between rooms, but plenty to touch: hidden Fanta bottles and cans to spot, hotspots that trigger small interactions, puzzles to work out, and jump scares lurking in the dark. Nothing is explained in text — icons, animation and a thick layer of horror sound design carry the player through instead. Everything collected along the way converts into in-app currency that can be redeemed for prizes, closing out the session.
Results
The build reached close to 100% implementation across 23 countries with no adaptation costs, growing Fanta's first-party database in the process.
- 1
Players reach the game through a seasonal section inside the Coca-Cola mobile app: Fanta's Haunted Mansion, a virtual haunted house available only there.
- 2
The opening screen teaches the core input with a wordless animated icon: press and hold to open doors and move between spaces, with no text anywhere in the interface.
- 3
The mansion consists of four connected, dimly lit rooms — hall, kitchen, dining room, and orangery — each rendered as a 360° panorama the player looks around by physically rotating the phone, or by dragging a finger across the screen if gyroscope access isn't granted; an unprompted player gets a short wordless nudge to turn or drag.
- 4
Each room hides one or more hotspots, tappable points that trigger further actions; the first one a player finds plays an intro video that pulls them into the mansion's backstory.
- 5
The core loop is collecting hidden Fanta bottles and cans scattered through each room's hotspots.
- 6
Poking into dark corners and solving what's hidden there triggers jump scares, while creaks, rustles, and spatial sound design — rather than any text — cue the player where to look and keep tension up.
- 7
Holding on a room's transition point carries the player onward through the mansion's fixed sequence, from hall to kitchen to dining room to orangery.
- 8
Exploring the rooms and collecting products earns in-app currency, which the player later redeems for prizes elsewhere in the Coca-Cola app.
- 9
A separate Snapchat Lens set in the same mansion offers another entry point, pairing a front-facing face mask with a rear-facing World Lens that builds the haunted decor around the player.
