Draw Ketchup: Heinz Used AI to Prove an Insight It Already Had

Case study · Marketing 475 · AI as a Creative Partner

Heinz did not start with AI. It started with a human truth, that people picture Heinz when they think of ketchup, and then used an AI image generator as fresh evidence for it.

The situation

Heinz is one of the most recognized food brands in the world. As of 2022, Muse by Clios reported that Heinz held about 60 percent of the U.S. ketchup market and about 80 percent in Europe. The bottle, the red color and the keystone label are deeply familiar.

In January 2021, Kraft Heinz Canada and the agency Rethink ran a simple test called “Draw Ketchup.” They asked people to draw ketchup, without mentioning Heinz. Most people drew a red bottle with the Heinz name on it. Others drew the label, the “57” or a tomato on the vine. One person drew mustard. Heinz turned the best drawings into limited-edition labels and invited Canadians to submit their own.

The challenge

By mid-2022, AI image generators were suddenly everywhere in the news and on social feeds. Many brands rushed to use them. The risk for any brand was obvious: a stunt about the technology says nothing about the brand, and people forget it.

Heinz also wanted to stay relevant with younger audiences, according to the agency’s award entry. The question was how to join a hot conversation without letting the tool become the story.

What they did

In July 2022, Heinz and Rethink extended Draw Ketchup into what they called “A.I. Ketchup.” They gave DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generator, prompts that did not name Heinz, such as “ketchup,” “ketchup art,” “ketchup renaissance” and “impressionist painting of a ketchup bottle.” According to Heinz, the AI “created drawings that were almost always quintessentially Heinz ketchup.”

The framing was the same as the 2021 campaign. Jacqueline Chao, a Heinz senior brand manager, said the team saw “a natural opportunity to extend our Draw Ketchup campaign” and test whether Heinz was synonymous with ketchup in the AI space too.

• A launch video built from a montage of the AI images
• Posts on Twitter and Instagram
• An out-of-home activation in downtown Toronto
• An invitation for fans to suggest their own prompts, with some results produced and shared by the brand

What happened

The work spread quickly through press and social media and later won industry awards. The results below come from the agency’s own case materials, so treat them as self-reported.

• More than 850 million earned impressions worldwide (Rethink case entry, 2023)
• Earned media value reported as more than 2,500 percent greater than the media investment (Rethink case entry, 2023)
• Engagement rate 38 percent higher than past campaigns (Rethink case entry, 2023)
• A 2023 Clio Gold award, according to the Ads of the World listing

Why it worked

The insight came first. Heinz already knew, from the 2021 human test, that people picture its bottle when they hear the word ketchup. The AI version did not invent that idea. It repeated the same test with a new kind of witness. If an image model trained on huge amounts of online imagery also draws Heinz, that is a striking piece of proof.

The idea was also easy to understand in one image. You did not need to know how DALL-E 2 worked. You saw a painting of ketchup and recognized the label. That made it shareable and gave the press a clear headline.

Finally, it was a continuation, not a one-off. Because Draw Ketchup already existed, the AI chapter built on brand memory instead of starting over.

Where it gets complicated

The AI result is not neutral evidence. Image generators learn from existing pictures, and Heinz has decades of advertising and packaging in the world. A market leader will tend to show up in AI output because it already dominates the visual record. A small brand could not run this campaign. The idea works only because Heinz was already the default.

The test was also curated. The prompts were chosen by the team, and Heinz itself said the outputs were “almost always” Heinz, not always. Students should notice that a campaign selects its best examples. That is normal in advertising, but it is not a controlled experiment.

There is also a creative question. The concept, the prompts, the selection and the campaign plan all came from people. The AI produced images. Calling this an “AI campaign” can hide where the real thinking happened.

The marketing principle

AI is most useful as a creative partner when it serves an idea you already believe is true about people. Heinz started with a human insight, proved it with people in 2021, and then used AI as a second, newsworthy proof in 2022. The tool made the idea timely. The idea still came from the team.

Sources

• Heinz asks AI to draw ketchup, LBB Online (2022)
• Asked to ‘Draw Ketchup,’ Even A.I. Chose Heinz, Muse by Clios (2022)
• Heinz anonymously asked people to draw ketchup. They all drew Heinz, LBB Online (2021)
• A.I. Ketchup, Ads of the World (2023)

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