Why Fanta’s Beetlejuice tastes like the future of movie marketing

The Coca-Cola Company sells about 2 billion drinks around the world every day. Each one has the potential to be a little billboard in your hand. Which is why we’ve seen plenty of movies use marketing partnerships to turn Coke brands’ packaging into blockbuster promotions: Avengers, The Matrix sequels, James Bond, and beyond. But leading up to this week’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice release, Warner Bros. went a step further.

Fanta has launched a limited edition Beetlejuice flavor to mark the return, after 36 years, of Michael Keaton’s iconic character. The brand has also issued multiple special-edition packaging tapping into various characters from the new film. Fanta Orange, for example, features Jenna Ortega’s Astrid character, and Fanta Strawberry is tied to Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz. But the limited-edition flavor features a black-and-white-striped can, tailored to the main character’s signature style.

@luv.editing.x I love jenna so much (I really didn’t buy 8 cans just because of her.) #jennaortega #jennaortegabeetlejuice #fanta #fyp #fy #viral ♬ original sound – FreddyFazBowTie

@luv.editing.x I love jenna so much (I really didn’t buy 8 cans just because of her.) #jennaortega #jennaortegabeetlejuice #fanta #fyp #fy #viral ♬ original sound – FreddyFazBowTie

I love jenna so much (I really didn’t buy 8 cans just because of her.) #jennaortega #jennaortegabeetlejuice #fanta #fyp #fy #viral

The brand partnership campaign is running across 50 global markets and includes digital and in-person experiences for fans. For the studio and soda execs, the Beetlejuice Fanta works, and particularly the limited-edition flavor is tailored specifically for the film and its audience. That represents how film and brand partnerships need to evolve, particularly if they want to get the attention of an ever-elusive audience.

“Beetlejuice is a brand that is beloved, but it is a film that came out 35 years ago,” says Dana Nussbaum, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros. “So as we were going into market, we definitely had the responsibility of taking this beloved brand and not only reintroducing it, but introducing it to some audiences for the very first time, particularly Gen Z.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Fanta (@fanta)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fanta (@fanta)

Getting Gen Z—or anyone else, for that matter—to pay attention to a movie, let alone actually go to the theater and pay to see it is an oft-discussed existential question for the entertainment industry. For marketers, it means treating each film as its own unique brand. A decade ago, Nussbaum says partnerships used to be more about simply slapping a movie logo on a can.

“It was really about brand presence, and it wasn’t necessarily fully bespoke,” says Nussbaum. “It was really about bolting onto something that already existed. What we’ve seen now is a higher bar for everything. You have to build it together. You can’t bolt onto anything existing. You truly have to link arms and build it from the ground up.”

Finding a perfect Fanta fit

For Ibrahim Khan, Coca-Cola’s global vice president of marketing, Fanta and the famed bio-exorcist character are made for each other: “If someone asked me to name the perfect movie franchise for Fanta, I couldn’t have come up with something better.”

Coca-Cola had begun a brand overhaul on Fanta in 2023, giving it a new logo, bottle packaging, and reformulated flavor. The vibe positioned the brand as quirky, eccentric, and a bit more creatively risky. That campaign focused on mobile gaming and Gen Z-creator partnerships to help build up Fanta’s name and products with a younger audience. It included a limited edition Halloween flavor that was black, the color your tongue turned after drinking it.

Khan says the campaign went incredibly well, so tying this year’s limited flavor to Beetlejuice was a perfect fit. “We typically do a limited-edition flavor across some of our markets, but it’s typically tiny and different in different parts of the world,” says Khan. “So when we got the partnership with Warner Bros. on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it was a great opportunity to give that scale. Our fans expect us to do the limited-edition flavor, but to do it as a Beetlejuice experience across so many markets was taking it to another level.”

The value of trust and Barbie

Clearly, matching up a global sugar-water brand with a long-awaited sequel of a beloved movie is neither surprising, nor especially risky. The risk is in how it’s done. Khan says that today, a big part of engaging audiences and attracting new ones is actually trusting them.

“You have to trust that the consumer will make the attribution if they enjoy what they’re seeing,” says Khan. “The whole logo impulse comes from the need for attribution, right? Like, ‘I need people to see this is from Fanta.’ But it’s a different world. If you have people doing TikTok videos with Jenna Ortega Fanta cans, it’s very clear to me that they know this is a Fanta and Warner Bros. partnership.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_JaKVdv0wU/

Nussbaum says she learned a lot last year through the studio’s brand sponsorship bonanza around Barbie and Wonka. One look at the laundry list of Barbie brand partnerships across a cornucopia of product categories, and it’s clear a significant lesson was to think far beyond obvious brand-partnership categories. It’s about the audience first.

It’s why we have Beetlejuice partnerships with brands as wide-ranging as Secret deodorant, CarMax, and an “after life menu” from Denny’s. “Think about where they are and where they’re spending their time,” she says. “If it’s an audience that you’re trying to introduce something to for the first time, where are they? What are they doing? What do they care about? Then meet them where they are.”