Task: Help Heinz generate buzz and engagement for year three of Heinz Tomato Blood - an LTO bottle of Heinz ketchup for Halloween.
Audience: Halloween holds an outsized importance for our audience, young millennials. For them, it’s about clout and creative expression. It’s about indulging in extreme fears. And it’s about celebrating Spooky Season and the wonderful lore that surrounds it. After all, vampires, werewolves and zombies aren't just a costume but a driving force of their cultural consumption (see: Teen Wolf, Twilight, Walking Dead, The Last of Us) and identity beyond just October 31st.
Insight: Heinz Tomato Blood is actually blood for vegetarian vampires.
Ambition: We aimed to mobilize the perfect advocates who would catapult us into the Halloween conversation and make Heinz Tomato Blood synonymous with Halloween culture–a group who would benefit most from Tomato Blood. The obvious answer was Vampires. For centuries, there had been no alternative sustenance for vampires who didn’t want to drink human blood. Until now.
If regular vampires drink human blood, then vegetarian vampires drink Heinz Tomato Blood. We treated the campaign as a real marketing effort to convince this thriving subculture to go vegetarian, with our product front and center.
SWITCH TO HEINZ TOMATO BLOOD, BECAUSE HUMANS ARE PEOPLE TOO.
If regular vampires drink human blood, vegetarian vampires drink Tomato Blood. To convince vampires to go vegetarian and drink Tomato Blood, we created a fictional vegetarian vampire influencer who prefers the taste of Tomato Blood and tasked actual influencer E.J. Marcus to play the character known as “Toby the Vegetarian Vampire.”
Throughout the month of October, our vampire influencer Toby was the face of every campaign touchpoint.
Toby Recruitment PSA: Our :90 hero film starred Toby making an appeal to vampires to spare human lives and drink Tomato Blood. The film debuted on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, on 9/26. PR launched on 9/27 with two versions of the press release from Toby: one in human English and one in our custom vampiric glyph. Toby’s recruitment PSA also recruited vampires live on TV during AMC’s premiere of Interview with the Vampire on 10/2.
Social Takeover: Toby took over Heinz’s Instagram & TikTok channels, posting exclusively at night. His content throughout the month of October leaned into influencer trends, like GRWM, What I Eat in a Day, and Room Tour.
Toby Goes to Six Flags: Toby shared multiple promo IG Reels & TikToks to introduce the LTO dish “Totally Loaded Fright Fest Bloody Nacho Fries” at select Six Flags parks.
Toby OOH: Billboards using our own vampiric font ran in cities renowned for vampire lore and haunted history tourism like Salem, NOLA, Portland and Chicago. A QR code on the billboard led curious humans to a TikTok translation from Toby.
Twitch: Toby enlisted popular Twitch streamers in our Heinz Tomato Bloodless Challenge to kill without blood in cult-favorite horror game Dead by Daylight.
Fandom.com: Toby was featured in Fandom’s NYC Comic Con event and he took over wikis of other famous vampires.
Reddit: Finally, Toby showed up on vampire subreddits through a series of sponsored posts, conversational ads and engagement prompts gifting Reddit gold.
All in all, we were able to utilize Toby, our vegetarian vampire influencer, in a native way across touchpoints where vampires, vampire fandom and conversation amongst young millennials about vampires thrive in a fully integrated campaign.
Our creative KPIs were social engagement and conversation, as well as clicks and purchases. Through this campaign, we successfully activated this subculture of vampire enthusiasts and engaged with a broader
audience of vampire-loving and Halloween-obsessed humans to get everyone talking about Heinz Tomato Blood. The campaign performance metrics and results proved this:
Business Impact: Our campaign led to a +12.5% lift in sales of Heinz Ketchup October 2022 vs. 2021
Earned Media Impact: Our campaign garnered 457.2M+ earned impressions, 83% over our benchmark goal.
Engagement Impact:
10x increase in daily average follower growth
30% increase in total profile likes
Campaign engagement rate far surpassed brand benchmarks on Instagram by 400%
Campaign engagement rate & click-through rates surpassed TikTok benchmarks by 80% and 320%, respectively
Exceeded 2-second view rate TikTok benchmarks by 175%
