Heinz Ketchup is a cultural icon - it’s not just a ketchup, it is the ketchup. But its status as an establishment brand meant it was in danger of losing relevance with younger audiences. Our objective was to reinvigorate a connection with consumers who weren’t seeing Heinz as a contemporary brand.

In 2022, text-to-image A.I. generators took over the Internet, with people making wild images from written prompts like “Napoleon riding a Harley.” Since we already know that when people think of Ketchup, they think of Heinz, we wanted to find out what happens when you ask artificial intelligence.

We turned to DALL-E 2, the most advanced Al image generator - so advanced that it wasn’t even available to the general public yet - and asked it what "ketchup" looked like. The result? Even to Al, ketchup looks like Heinz. Then we invited consumers to suggest ketchup-based prompts for us to try. And as the prompts got weirder, from "Renaissance Ketchup Bottle" to "Ketchup Tarot Card", the Al still generated results that looked like Heinz. Then we turned the images into a global OOH, print and social campaign – the first-ever campaign with visuals generated entirely by AI, co-authored by fans.

Throughout the world Heinz is considered to be a cultural icon. Heinz is ketchup. But to connect with a new, younger generation of tech and art fans who were seeing Heinz as old and nostalgic - we had to find a way to prove it without saying it ourselves.

We knew this audience wouldn’t be receptive to yet another brand talking about themselves, so we had to find a completely unbiased way to prove that Heinz = Ketchup. So, we used cutting-edge A.I. and asked a simple question: what does “ketchup” look like. Even when we invited consumers to provide us with ketchup-based prompts on social, we had a strong feeling the result would unanimously be Heinz.

We began by launching a video on social that invited people to suggest ketchup-based image prompts. Suggestions poured in from around the world – even other brands like Ducati and Sportsnet chimed in with A.I. ketchup image requests. We took these suggestions and turned them into the first-ever campaign with visuals generated entirely by AI, and co-authored by consumers. These unaltered images suggested by fans became a global OOH campaign with print placements in the New York Times and USA Today.

Keeping to the A.I. theme, we launched an art gallery in the metaverse where people flocked to experience the wonderfully wacky Heinz images for themselves. Finally, we brought things into the real world by showcasing the images in an art gallery in Toronto, Canada and by producing a run of special edition Heinz bottles that featured Heinz A.I. images as the label.

Originally launched in Canada and the US, our campaign quickly went global, generating over 1.15 billion earned impressions around the world (worth over 2500% more than our media investment). Our 18 OOH boards delivered over 55 million impressions and received coverage in leading trade, art, tech, and lifestyle media outlets like Fast Company, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and Forbes. On social, we saw an engagement rate 38% higher than past campaigns, with a significant presence in China, Chile, and Brazil.

By capitalizing on the text-to-image AI trend before any other brand, our first-to-market campaign proved to a younger generation of tech and culture fans that Heinz is the ketchup. Even the machines agree. Our campaign was so impactful, that in response Dall-E 2 was retrained to reduce brand bias.