Ads that feel exciting on a brief — fast cuts, bold type, big soundtrack — are the ones most likely to leave audiences unmoved. The elements that drive attention and emotion are those that feel more like storytelling than advertising: strong characters, dread, narrative tension, and the sense of a world with real stakes. Horror uses all of them. It bypasses the rational and lands in the body.
Here are five tactics from the Storytelling Engine that put the problem somewhere in the spooky basement.
- Turn the everyday problem into a nightmare
- Make the product the object of fear, obsession or seduction
- Use genre as a diagnostic device
- Use horror to expose a social truth
- Make the product the hero of a high-stakes mission
1. Turn the Everyday Problem into a Nightmare
Take a frustration people normally dismiss as minor — and exaggerate it into full cinematic horror. The benefit becomes the only way out.
The Clogging — Scott / Kimberly-Clark, VaynerMedia, 2023
Scott needed to make its anti-clogging toilet paper benefit feel noticeable in a category where every claim sounds identical. VaynerMedia's answer: treat clogging the toilet at your in-laws' as the setup for a full-blown horror film. Classic genre conventions — ominous pacing, rising dread, escalating panic, full cinematic sound design — applied to one of the most painfully relatable household disasters imaginable. The exaggeration inflated the emotional stakes of a small product truth into something people actually watched and shared.
HP Wolf (Wieden+Kennedy, 2021) turned endpoint cybersecurity into a noir thriller starring Christian Slater as a hacker who exploits weak office security — dramatising every product benefit with tension and stakes. A dry B2B message became a watchable series. Don't Risk It (Propel Manila, 2021) used miniature horror trailers to frame the nightmare of buying counterfeit electronics — glitching headphones, no tech support, orders that never arrive..
