Few brands want ‘smacked’ by customers. For Heinz, its an award-winning idea

Heinz has enormous reach and ubiquity, but some places still serve inferior, off-brand ketchup, and others refuse to serve the red sauce altogether. In Chicago, serving ketchup on a hot dog is practically a crime. So we set out to make Heinz available at these vehemently anti-Heinz places.

Our objective was to ignite a conversation that proved to these restaurants that despite what they may believe – their customers want Heinz.

Strategy

Our target for this campaign was irrational Heinz ketchup fans. We found that nearly four out of five people (88%) prefer Heinz ketchup when eating out, but still, a lot of restaurants still won’t serve it. Some places serve off-brand ketchup and pretend it’s Heinz, others have banned the red condiment altogether. These restaurants had always been a no-fly zone for the Heinz brand. We couldn’t get our product into these restaurants – so we put it outside of them. Our strategy and approach was simple: target the moments and locations where fans are most desperate for Heinz.

Creative Idea

We started by bringing our smackable, Heinz-dispensing board to the city most notorious for its anti-ketchup stance: Chicago. Chicago restaurants firmly believe that Heinz doesn’t belong on hot dogs, so naturally, we placed our board outside of famous Chicago hot dog spots.

We then invited people to tell us where they weren’t getting Heinz and data-mined customer complaints about missing ketchup on platforms like YELP. We found a restaurant in LA with a super strict anti-ketchup policy and another in Connecticut that kicks people out when they ask for ketchup. Every time we learned of a new Heinzless location, we brought a Heinz board to it.

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But there was one name we kept hearing over and over again: McDonald’s. After they stopped serving Heinz for 10 years, everyone wanted these beloved brands to reunite. So naturally, we placed our Heinz-dispensing billboard right in front of several McDonald’s locations.

To scale our campaign further, we launched a digital experience allowing people to smack their phone in moments of ketchup desperation. We scaled nationally with 180 digital boards, targeting places that didn’t serve Heinz.

Every execution was aimed at ensuring no matter the restaurant – our fans could get their hands on Heinz.

Results

With the launch of Smack for Heinz, we got Heinz in restaurants that had always been a no-fly zone for the brand. We broke the rules by bringing Heinz to restaurants across Chicago, where sales had fallen 20% below the national average due to their strict ketchup norms.

Grammy-nominated DJ Marshmello even performed above our board in Chicago, attracting a crowd of thousands. When we went nationwide, we targeted 180 restaurants, including Louis Lunch, the birthplace of the hamburger which famously bans ketchup. Our mobile website recorded 24K visits, where people could smack their phones for Heinz.

Though we’d ruffled some feathers, our launch video performed 157% above social benchmarks and garnered a 99% positive sentiment. We’d created an explosive national conversation, with pick up by major outlets like USA Today, The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert, Fox & more. In a few short weeks, we’ve already earned 500m impressions.

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