On 26 August 2026, Fanta launched “Fanta's Haunted Universe” in 50 markets, its first proprietary horror franchise, developed over a year and a half with the AI production studio GRAiL (official press release, Marketing Dive). After two years of Hollywood licences on its cans, the brand moves from collaborator to creator: a textbook case for any company considering generative AI for content production.
The facts
- On 24 August, a cinematic trailer revealed four original creatures, a pumpkin-headed scarecrow, a vampire in a sports car, a cyborg Frankenstein and a werewolf DJ, fighting over a city for an elixir that grants the power to rule over the living and the dead. The full campaign followed on 26 August in 50 markets: collector cans, a limited-edition flavour, the return of the Haunted Fanta Factory experience and an influencer programme whose creators received the lore and backstories of the characters (Marketing Dive).
- Ghost Face, the killer from Scream, joins the universe as its first guest character, revealed on 26 August: a “Ghost Face Punch” pack in a limited Dark Berry Punch flavour, with Roger Jackson, the character's long-standing voice, returning for the campaign (Bloody Disgusting).
- The creative platform comes from GRAiL, a studio launched in 2025 by Davide Bianca and Jeff Krelitz around four pillars (premium production, original IP, AI creative technology, talent incubation), within a WPP Open X set-up led by Ogilvy, with VML, WPP Media, WPP Production and the agency ForPeople. Fanta's Halloween 2025 campaign, still under licences, generated 10 billion impressions.
Why does a brand build its own universe instead of renting licences?
Because a licence is handed back at the end of the season, while a universe is owned. The ambition stated by Ibrahim Khan, Fanta's global vice-president of marketing, is to make Halloween for Fanta what Christmas is for Coca-Cola: a brand territory reactivated every year, whose value compounds over time, where each collaboration used to start again from zero. The 10 billion impressions of the 2025 edition give the scale of what is at stake. The set-up is no all-or-nothing bet either: by inviting Ghost Face from the first season, Fanta keeps a familiar face to capture immediate attention while its own creatures settle in. Khan says as much: these legends are recognised everywhere, so the brand had to build on them and handle them with care at the same time.
The role of AI deserves a close look, because it contradicts the fantasy of instant content. Khan is insistent: some people think a brand universe comes out of a few clicks, whereas this one took a year and a half of work. GRAiL is a studio that aligns screenwriters, editors, artists and technologists on generative tools, a long way from a simple image generator, and Fanta compares the shift to the move from traditional animation to computer-generated imagery. The contrast with Coca-Cola's precedent is instructive: Davide Bianca, co-founder of GRAiL, had directed with Diesol the AI-generated “Holidays Are Coming” advert produced by the Secret Level studio in November 2024, widely mocked as soulless AI content (NBC News), followed by a fresh round of criticism for the 2025 edition (TechRadar). Same creative set-up, opposite reception: the method explains the gap. A world written and directed by humans and produced with AI tells a different story from a render that came out of a prompt.
AIxH's view
What an art director takes from this case is the order of operations, well before the size of the budget: Fanta first wrote a world, characters and a lore, then put AI to work in service of that writing. This is the logic we apply within AIxH's Content creation & social media service, a social media agency in Luxembourg: human brief, AI production, human validation before publication. At the scale of a Luxembourg company, there is no need for 50 markets: a recurring character, a seasonal fixture and a consistent visual universe are enough to build a content identity you own and reactivate year after year, instead of starting from scratch with every campaign. The right question for 2027 comes up now: which small piece of mythology your brand can start writing this year.