Zillow’s core experience is an online destination where people can dream about and shop for their next home. During the pandemic, with people stuck in their homes dreaming of what’s next, this brand experience became more integral to people’s lives than ever. So we needed to activate an “up-leveled” brand experience. Keep it new, relevant, and surprising. What did we do? The pandemic closed Halloween Haunted Houses. So Zillow opened a Virtual Haunted House.

The creepy old Haunted House tour. It’s a classic Halloween tradition. But during a global pandemic, you can’t have people jumping scaring you in the face. So since Zillow is the place that gives millions of people a virtual house experience, it made sense that during this freaky time Zillow would offer a virtual haunted house experience.

We targeted people who were searching for their next home and enabled them to learn about one of our emerging new products – Zillow 3D Home Tours with Floor Plans. We created a terrifying listing for a spooky haunted house… and embedded a scary video promoting Zillow 3D Home tours within the listing.

On Zillow.com, home seekers were invited to take a 3D tour of its creepiest listing, a haunted mansion at 667 Dead End Drive on Halloween. The neoclassical-style mansion is haunted by former owner Edith Thistle and has a home details page like any other home on the site. However, the listing includes some eerie specifications. Under “Home Facts” the “Home Type” is listed as being a “multi-poltergeist house." Under “Home value” the listing states “Owners will pay you.” Included in the listing is a video of a tour that takes the user throughout the mansion as it increasingly becomes spookier with each room of the house. In the week leading up to the launch of the listing, teasers built suspense for the campaign – reaching Zillow’s 3.5 million social media followers.

Over the course of a single day with a media budget of under $40k, it received 3,696,644 media impressions, 7x our benchmark click-through rate, and it drove over 60,000 unique visits to Zillow.com.