Heinz is one of the great examples of a legacy brand that keeps finding creative ways to leverage its most powerful asset: iconicity. When the brand ran a campaign asking people to 'draw ketchup' and found that virtually everyone drew a Heinz bottle, it was revealing something most advertisers spend decades trying to achieve. The brand's recent work - including its response to Heinz being named in an AI prompt experiment - shows a company confident enough to be playful with how well-known it already is.
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NEVER ENOUGH
- Heinz · Saatchi & Saacthi MEA · 2024
Economic pressure has quietly reduced the handful of ketchup sachets in a delivery bag to one, maybe two, and the resulting irritation had already become a running complaint online. Heinz did not manufacture the sentiment, it recognised one that existed, and turned a shared annoyance into proof of h
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Weather Idents
- Heinz · 2022
Heinz "Weather Idents". A cosy soup hero ties Heinz Big Soup to comforting cold-weather eating for a run of TV weather-sponsorship idents. Heinz owns the moment bad weather calls for soup.
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It Has To Be Heinz
- Heinz · rethink · 2022
Heinz's first global platform in 150 years dramatises real, absurd fan behaviour sourced from Reddit and TikTok - people ordering ketchup at restaurants that don't stock it, smuggling bottles into hotels, putting Heinz on sushi and ice cream, refusing every substitute. The insight is that devotion t
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Tapeover
- Heinz · Saatchi & Saatchi MEA · 2026
To overcome its lack of official World Cup sponsorship, Heinz tapped into a powerful insight: its bottle's shape is so iconic, it's recognizable even when officials tried to tape over the label in stadiums. The creative idea, 'Tapeover', reframed this act of censorship as a testament to the brand's
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Heinz on Film
- Heinz · rethink · 2022
Tapping into the insight that Heinz Ketchup is such an icon it appears in films and TV shows uncredited, the brand sought to solidify its status. The creative idea was to treat the ketchup bottle as an uncredited actor and petition the film database IMDb to officially list 'Heinz Ketchup' as a perfo
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A.I. Ketchup
- Heinz · Rethink · 2023
To prove its status as the world’s most iconic ketchup, Heinz turned to an unusual, unbiased focus group: artificial intelligence. The strategy was built on the insight that the brand is so synonymous with the category that even a non-human intelligence would recognize it as the default. The creativ
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Look Familiar?
- Heinz · rethink · 2026
The core insight is that Heinz has achieved such iconic status that its visual cues are synonymous with ketchup itself. The creative idea is to present unbranded, generic images of ketchup and simply ask "Look Familiar?". This mechanism leverages the audience's automatic mental association with Hein
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Draw Ketchup
- Heinz · rethink · 2021
Heinz asked people around the world to draw ketchup, and almost everyone drew a Heinz bottle - the label, the neck, the shape - without being asked to. Those drawings became the ads. The insight is that the brand had become the generic mental image of the product itself, the strongest position in ma
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TRUE LOVE WAITS
- Heinz · BBDO Asia · 2025
Christmas Eve, a table loaded with the Western dishes Southeast Asia has made its own - homemade sausages, hand-cut fries, lumpia, barbecue, pizza. The family says grace. The prayer ends. Nobody moves. They are waiting, and the room fills with the tension of a meal that cannot begin. The insight is
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Draw Ketchup
- Kraft Heinz · rethink · 2021
Heinz asked people around the world to draw ketchup, and almost everyone drew a Heinz bottle - the label, the neck, the shape - without being asked to. Those drawings became the ads. The insight is that the brand had become the generic mental image of the product itself, the strongest position in ma
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Can't Unsee It
- Kraft Heinz · Rethink · 2023
Deadpool wears red, Wolverine wears yellow - and Heinz made it impossible to watch the film without seeing ketchup and mustard, releasing what looked like a real trailer on Marvel's own channel until bottles began flashing through it, with Ryan Reynolds admitting he could not unsee it either. The in
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Just Crack an Egg - Just Date a Farmer
- Kraft Heinz · Leo Burnett · 2023
During the 2023 egg crisis - avian flu and inflation pushing prices up 70% - Just Crack an Egg offered a solution no supermarket could: date a farmer. Rethink partnered the breakfast brand with FarmersOnly.com, giving buyers a free year's subscription to the dating site, so the scarcity joke became
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It has to be heinz
- Heinz · VML Argentina · 2024
Restaurants around the world were caught refilling empty Heinz bottles with cheap generic ketchup - and rather than take offence, Heinz turned the fraud into the proof: even when it isn't Heinz, it has to be Heinz. The insight is that the deception is itself an admission, because nobody bothers to d
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Heinz 'It has to be Heinz' campaign
- Heinz · Wunderman Thompson · 2023
Restaurants around the world were caught refilling empty Heinz bottles with cheap generic ketchup - and rather than take offence, Heinz turned the fraud into the proof: even when it isn't Heinz, it has to be Heinz. The insight is that the deception is itself an admission, because nobody bothers to d
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It has to be
- Heinz · rethink · 2025
Restaurants around the world were caught refilling empty Heinz bottles with cheap generic ketchup - and rather than take offence, Heinz turned the fraud into the proof: even when it isn't Heinz, it has to be Heinz. The insight is that the deception is itself an admission, because nobody bothers to d
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Ed's Heinz Ad
- Heinz · amulet pictures · 2020
Ed Sheeran, a lifelong Heinz obsessive with the bottle tattooed on his arm, publicly pitched Heinz an ad on Instagram - and the brand said yes, then made the film he had proposed. The insight is that a genuine fan with real cultural reach is more persuasive than any endorsement the brand could buy,
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HELPING REDUCE FOOD WASTE SINCE 1869
- Heinz · Fitzroy Amsterdam · 2024
Heinz argued that its fans have been quietly preventing food waste for over 150 years - because ketchup is what makes the leftovers, the sprouts and the scraped-out pan edible. Period scenes across the decades show food being finished only because Heinz was on it. The insight is that the brand's mos
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It Has to Be Heinz
- Heinz · Rethink · 2024
Restaurants around the world were caught refilling empty Heinz bottles with cheap generic ketchup - and rather than take offence, Heinz turned the fraud into the proof: even when it isn't Heinz, it has to be Heinz. The insight is that the deception is itself an admission, because nobody bothers to d
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THE HEINZJACK
- Heinz · rethink communications · 2022
Barred from sponsoring the World Cup, Heinz found a man actually named Heinz - Thomas Heinz, from Hamburg - flew him to Qatar, dressed him in a bright red QR-coded shirt and sent him into the crowd, turning him into a Where's Wally for fans to hunt with #FindHeinz. The insight is that sponsorship ru
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Heinz
- heinz · rethink · 2024
Heinz solved the challenge of maintaining top-of-mind dominance against copycat brands by leveraging its most powerful distinctive brand asset: its iconic packaging. Capitalizing on the cultural truth that the Heinz bottle is so ubiquitous it remains instantly recognizable even when highly distorted
Heinz advertising is most instructive for what it teaches about category ownership. When you've spent 150 years becoming synonymous with a product, the advertising job isn't to build familiarity - it's to leverage it. The most effective Heinz campaigns understand that and find creative ways to make the brand's dominance feel charming rather than complacent.