When your 10-year-old poses a question “Daddy, I don’t want to waste time this Halloween; I want maximum treats”, my Ops and Planning brain gets triggered, and it doesn’t stop until something ridiculous has been created.
The story starts the day before Halloween. My son asked that question, and I immediately thought I’ll jump into Claude, spin up a Halloween sub-team and build him an interactive microsite so he can drop pins on the houses that have pumpkins or decorations 🎃
After some coffee, I decided that this was a terrible idea. I needed to go back to basics. We went onto Google Maps and printed out sections of the entire neighbourhood. We used sticky tape and had an A3 Frankenstein mock road atlas from the 1990s.
The first thing we needed to do was a reccy, which involved me driving 3/4mph up and down every road while the neighbours scowled at me, thinking I was scoping their houses for a sweet break-in. My son on the other hand (literally as he is left-handed) was writing down each and every house and street name. We started to get a bit of a rhythm going; I would say “On your left”, and he would know the road name and number.
We completed the reccy and returned to base with 5 pages of A4 addresses written like Heath Ledger’s Joker. We took those addresses and started adding tiny Xs to the map. At that point, I realised I couldn’t see the house numbers on the Google Maps printout, so we needed my phone on hand to type the address, find the house, and match the shape on the distorted map.
After about 10 mins, we realised we had way too many pins, and we needed a system to map this route. Child boss decided he would go on his scooter for maximum speed and efficiency. We had blue crosses for Halloween houses and red crosses as “pit-stops” at family and friends for extra sweets and chats.
We set off in search of sweets adventure. We turned the first corner and saw a group of my wife’s school friends. It was my first pitch of the map and how I developed it. They loved it, and others stared at me like I had three heads.
After nearly 2 hrs, the map served its purpose. We had two large bags of sweets and moved like a well-organised army unit between the Demon Hunters and Paw Patrol groups.
The result
Ideas for next year
- Weatherproof the map; it took a beating towards the end of the night.
- Conceal the map inside a costume.
- Dress up so you don’t look like a Dad holding an A3 piece of paper.
- Outbound campaign asking households to register before Halloween.
- Upsell maps to lost parents.