A chilling new Halloween 2024 ad from Six Flags featuring a creepy clown terrorising a group of housemates is the scariest ad of all time, according to an AI ranking by DAIVID.
Ahead of Fright Night, the global creative effectiveness platform – which helps advertisers measure and improve the effectiveness of their content – used its AI-powered tool, DAIVID Self-Serve, to find the spookiest ads ever. Ads featured in the list include campaigns that were banned from YouTube and TV for being 'too shocking' and 'distressing.'
Trained using tens of millions of human responses to ads, the new platform predicts the emotions an ad will generate, and its likely impact on brand and business metrics – enabling advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns at scale.
Six Flags’ "Tick,Tick,Tick" – released earlier this month and part of the theme park company’s annual “Fear Is Waiting” campaign – finished top of DAIVID’s terrifying top 10 after generating six times more intense feelings of fear than the average ad. It also generated nine times more intense feelings of horror and is 266% more likely to make people feel intense anxiety.
That put it ahead of Uber Eats’ 2022 ad "Don’t Run Out", which warns about the dangers of running out of treats on Halloween night, and another Fright Night ad released earlier this month from Clash Royale "The Royale Curse" in second and third respectively. A 2017 ad from Skittles featuring an office worker who becomes trapped on a mysterious elevator floor and Burger King’s "Scary Clown Night" make up the rest of the top 5.
Other spots to appear in DAIVID’s ranking of the top 10 ads most likely to leave people quivering behind their sofas include Dirt Devil’s scary spoof of the movie The Exorcist and Sony Playstation’s creepy 2006 ad "Baby". Ads to just miss out on terrifying top 10 include an ad for UK theme park Alton Towers and a chiling UK PSA from the 1970s warning of the dangers of children playing near water.
Top 10 Most Terrifying Ads - chosen by AI
| Rank | Campaign | Year launched | % of viewers likely to feel intense fear |
| 1. | Six Flags: "Tick,Tick,Tick” | 2024 | 19.5% |
| 2. | Uber Eats: "Don’t Run Out” | 2022 | 13.2% |
| 3. | Clash Royale: "The Royale Curse” | 2024 | 10.5% |
| 4. | Skittles: “Floor 9.5” | 2017 | 7.0% |
| 5. | Burger King: “Scary Clown Night” | 2017 | 6.4% |
| =6. | Fragile Childhood: “Monsters” | 2012 | 6.3% |
| =6. | Phones 4U: “Little Girl” | 2011 | 6.3% |
| 8. | Dirt Devil: “The Exorcist” | 2011 | 6.1% |
| 9. | Audi: “R8 Spyder” | 2010 | 6.0% |
| 10. | PS3: “Baby” | 2006 | 5.9% |
Ian Forrester, CEO and founder of creative effectiveness platform DAIVID, said: "Watching this list of ads should come with its own health warning. We trained our AI to predict the strength of emotions an ad will elicit from viewers, and the brands in our top 10 certainly manage that – from all-out shock to plain creepiness. Six Flags’ new Halloween ad looks like something straight out of a horror movie, generating intense feelings of fear, horror, and anxiety. Looks like even our AI model was spooked."
DAIVID’s AI models are built by combining facial coding, eye tracking, and survey data with computer vision and computer listening APIs, enabling advertisers to evaluate, quantify, and improve the effectiveness of their creative at scale without the need for audience panels.