How M&M's Brought Ghosting to Halloween With BBDO in 2018
M&M's Ghosted is a 15-second Halloween film created by BBDO New York, released in the United States in October 2018, in which the beloved spokescandies Red and Yellow believe they have survived the holiday, only for Yellow to reveal a large bite taken from the back of his head, transforming the modern social concept of being ghosted into a confectionery sight gag.
The campaign marked the brand's first major Halloween commercial in 11 years, according to reporting by The Drum and Marketing Dive, signalling a deliberate decision by Mars to re-engage seasonal advertising for one of the confectionery category's highest-volume retail moments. M&M's Senior Brand Director Allison Miazga-Bedrick described the intent directly: the team wanted to create a new spot to continue excitement around Halloween and surprise fans in a way that brings humour to one of the scariest nights of the year through a comedic M&M's take on the classic ghost story.
Beyond the hero 15-second film, the campaign extended into a six-second online cut titled Eaten, Spanish-language versions broadening reach within the United States, and supporting print advertising, giving the single central concept multiple points of contact with consumers across the Halloween season. The archive records one primary media asset, with the broader execution suite documented by The Drum and Marketing Dive in their October 2018 coverage. The campaign sits at a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a competent seasonal execution that connects cultural currency to an established character platform without breaking new creative ground.
M&M's occupies a structurally advantaged position in the United States confectionery market during Halloween, a period that drives concentrated candy purchasing across the country. The decision to return to seasonal television advertising after an 11-year absence reflects an acknowledgement that cultural relevance in the snacks category requires active maintenance, not passive brand equity.
The strategic engine behind Ghosted is the appropriation of a genuinely contemporary social behaviour — the act of cutting off contact with someone without explanation, widely known as ghosting — and fusing it with the brand's long-running anthropomorphized spokescandy platform. This move allowed M&M's to speak the language of a digitally literate consumer base without abandoning the physical, product-rooted humour that has defined the Red and Yellow characters for decades. The lateral connection between ghosting as a social phenomenon and a candy character literally becoming a ghost rewards attentive viewers while remaining immediately legible to casual ones.
In the United States, M&M's competes directly against chocolate-coated and countline products from Hershey, Mondelez, Nestlé, and Ferrero, all of which invest in seasonal advertising around Halloween. Returning to the holiday with a culturally native concept rather than a generic seasonal message represents a defensive move as much as an offensive one, reasserting category leadership through creative distinctiveness. According to Research and Markets, the global confectionery market grew at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 5.1 percent between 2018 and 2023, underscoring the commercial importance of the Halloween retail window across which brands like M&M's and its rivals compete most aggressively.
BBDO New York built the Ghosted campaign around a single visual revelation — the bite taken from the back of Yellow's head — executed within a 15-second runtime that demands immediate comprehension and an instant emotional payoff. The brevity is itself a creative choice: the joke has no room for setup beyond what the audience already knows about the characters, and the punchline must land without ambiguity.
The creative leadership at BBDO brought established authority to the work. David Lubars served as Chief Creative Officer of BBDO Worldwide on the campaign, with Greg Hahn credited as Chief Creative Officer of BBDO New York and Tim Bayne serving as a senior creative on the account. Their collective fingerprint on the campaign is visible in its economy — Ghosted trusts the audience's familiarity with both the spokescandies and the cultural concept of ghosting, declining to over-explain either.
The decision to produce a companion six-second cut titled Eaten, alongside Spanish-language versions for the United States market, demonstrates a production discipline that extends the core idea rather than diluting it. The six-second format, designed for pre-roll and digital environments, distils the campaign to its barest possible expression, which is a craft challenge distinct from the longer execution. The print component added a static dimension to a campaign whose central joke is fundamentally visual and physical, requiring the creative team to find a way to communicate the same reveal without the benefit of movement or character animation. Marketing Dive's Peter Adams, writing on October 12, 2018, characterised the campaign as tepid and noted criticism that the work moved away from the interactive character dynamics that had historically distinguished M&M's advertising, a point of creative tension worth noting in any honest assessment of the execution.
No verified sales lift, incremental revenue, or market-share data for the Ghosted campaign is publicly available. The campaign did not record wins at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's archive review.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 positions Ghosted as a functionally sound seasonal campaign that fulfils its brief without distinction. The score reflects the campaign's clarity of concept, its efficient use of the 15-second format, and its culturally timely central device, balanced against the limited creative ambition identified by Marketing Dive and the absence of any documented industry recognition.
Structurally, Ghosted succeeds on the terms most relevant to a Halloween snacks campaign: it is immediately comprehensible, brand-consistent, and distributable across multiple formats including digital pre-roll, Spanish-language broadcast, and print within the United States. The six-second Eaten cut in particular demonstrates an awareness of how short-form digital inventory works, delivering the brand identity and punchline within a window that offers no tolerance for slow setup. The campaign's 11-year gap in Halloween television advertising, as reported by The Drum and Marketing Dive, means Ghosted bore the additional burden of re-establishing the brand's seasonal presence, a reputational objective that performance metrics alone would not fully capture.
M&M's Ghosted is a 15-second Halloween film created by BBDO New York in 2018. The ad features spokescandies Red and Yellow believing they survived Halloween, before Yellow reveals a large bite taken from the back of his head, turning the social concept of ghosting into a product-rooted joke. The campaign also ran in a six-second digital cut and Spanish-language versions.
Ghosted was M&M's first major Halloween television commercial in 11 years, according to The Drum and Marketing Dive. That gap made the campaign's return to seasonal advertising strategically significant, using a culturally contemporary concept to reassert the brand's presence during one of the confectionery category's most competitive retail periods in the United States.
BBDO New York created Ghosted for M&M's in 2018. David Lubars served as Chief Creative Officer of BBDO Worldwide on the campaign, with Greg Hahn as Chief Creative Officer of BBDO New York and Tim Bayne in a senior creative role. M&M's Senior Brand Director Allison Miazga-Bedrick led the client side of the work.
M&M's Ghosted did not win awards at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's archive review. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, indicating a competent seasonal execution without award-level creative distinction.
Marketing Dive's Peter Adams, writing on October 12, 2018, described Ghosted as tepid, criticising the campaign for moving away from the interactive character dynamics that had historically defined M&M's advertising. The Drum also covered the campaign at launch, providing a broadly neutral account of its creative premise and seasonal positioning within the United States snacks market.
Ghosted ran as a 15-second television film, a six-second digital pre-roll cut titled Eaten, Spanish-language versions for the United States market, and print advertising. This multi-format approach extended a single visual punchline across broadcast, digital, and static channels throughout the Halloween season, according to coverage by The Drum and Marketing Dive.
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