As the world's #1 ketchup brand for over 150 years, Heinz has its challenges with maintaining relevance and brand love, especially with younger consumers. Halloween is extremely popular on the Gen Z dominated TikTok. Our challenge was to take the newly launched Heinz TikTok and create a campaign to engage authentically with the TikTok community.

For years Heinz has been making cameos in horror movies as fake blood. Unfortunately, with Gen Z ditching TV for TikTok these campy classics weren’t going to get the same viewership they had in the past. To stay top of mind during the Halloween season we couldn’t rely on Gen Z stumbling across our old reruns. So we decided to create our own and introduce ‘57 Ways To Dine’, a collaborative horror film where each scene was filmed by a different TikTok user. Users could film anything they wanted as long as they included Heinz as fake blood.

Creating campaigns for TikTok must be done in an authentic way for it to be well received by the userbase. Seeing how popular trends & challenges during 2021 led us to think that if we made a collaborative campaign it would perform better on the platform. This is what led us to a UGC approach for our Halloween campaign.

57 Ways to Dine ran from October 13th - 31st. The campaign was executed purely on social media and primarily through TikTok. Throughout the campaign, we featured paid and organic content on FB, IG, Twitter, and TikTok to provide inspiration and remind users to submit an entry. On October 22nd we compiled all submissions and developed a horror mini-movie that premiered on Halloween through TikTok Live.

With only 1 month of planning and a minimal total budget of under $33,000 that needed to be allocated towards creative brainstorming, project management, asset production, PR, and media buys, the Heinz 57 Ways to Dine Halloween campaign resulted in over 10,000,000 impressions across all channels, which was 42% higher than our target impressions KPI, and a total of 7,200 engagements.