Fanta is building its own Halloween universe after teaming up with Chucky and M3gan

Coca-Cola's Fanta is creating its own scary characters for Halloween as part of a world-building exercise.

Fanta Coca-Cola's Fanta is styling itself as an entertainment brand with four new characters for Halloween.

The soda brand wants to build a "universe" of products and experiences that'll endure past Halloween.

It's a shift toward Fanta being a creator in its own right, not just a collaborator with Hollywood.

After doing tie-ins with iconic scary movie characters like Chucky and M3gan , Coca-Cola's Fanta wants to make some spooky personas of its own.

Ahead of Halloween , the soda brand is introducing four characters as part of a kickoff to what it's calling Fanta's Haunted Universe, which it describes as a collection of products, content, and experiences.

Over the next three months, there will be soda cans featuring the characters, rewards fans can collect, and live experiences that expand on the brand's Haunted Fanta Factory, which it built last year to attract horror fans.

Fanta worked with the AI entertainment studio GRAiL to create the characters, which resemble familiar figures like Frankenstein's monster and vampires, but with their own designs and backstories.

They're being introduced in a horror-movie-style trailer that goes live on Monday.

It features menacing jack-o'-lanterns going on a rampage through city streets, a DJing werewolf, and two onlookers enjoying the scene over — what else — a can of Fanta.

"We want Halloween to be an enduring platform for Fanta, just like how we had Christmas for Coke ," Ibrahim Khan, global VP of marketing at Fanta, told Business Insider.

"We want to be able to give a consistent experience to consumers, one that we can grow year on year on year for many, many Halloweens to come.

And in order to do that, it almost necessitated that we would start world-building of our own." It's another example of brands seeking to become media companies and entertainers in their own right, as marketers shift budgets away from traditional media like TV.

Khan said Fanta will still use TV ads as a small part of the mix, but that the brand has stopped using TV altogether in some places in the US and China as it prioritizes social content that fans can riff on.