Heinz Ketchup is an iconic brand for its superior taste and versatility. But to drive impactful growth, the brand needed to increase sales outside of the key summer grilling season. Our challenge was to engage modern families and build Heinz Ketchup sales.

In 2020 Halloween was sidelined, and many families were hoping for the return of trick-or-treating and costume parades. So, in 2021 when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their pandemic holiday safety guidelines and told families, “It's now okay to go trick-or-treating outside,” families cheered – and so did Heinz Ketchup! Ketchup has been widely used as a stand-in for blood in spooky displays, on the silver screen, and on costumes. Heinz Ketchup can turn any costume extra frightening with just a squirt.

Halloween is a holiday rooted in transforming and becoming someone else. What a perfect holiday for a brand to don its own costume and parade as something else!

So we put on our own disguise. With a fabulous costume of a new Heinz Tomato Blood label, Heinz Tomato Blood hit the shelves at national grocery stores starting September 16th. But our blood was just starting to flow…

We built a live event experience to super-charge family creativity and scaled it virtually to reach more people, as well as to provide families with a COVID safe way to engage. The event was architected to maximize fun and creative brand interaction.

By getting Heinz Tomato Blood into the hands and creative minds of our modern families, we knew we could deliver on our goals of engaging consumers and driving sales.

We brought #HeinzHalloween to life by launching a pop-up shop near Los Angeles. The Heinz Halloween Store opened between 10/21 and 10/31, inviting fans to squirt, splatter and bloody up their costumes or purchase a kit to design at home.

To extend the in-store experience, we hosted a first-to-market, shoppable livestream from the store that was broadcast simultaneously across multiple platforms – both inside and outside social media’s walled gardens, partnering with Firework. This never-been-done-before scalable solution brought the excitement of the pop-up shop and Heinz Tomato Blood to a national audience.

The livestream was hosted on the Heinz website and social channels Facebook/YouTube, as well as popular mom sites like Momtastic.com and others. On social, we leaned into authentic content via TikTok influencers and a branded effect for trying on Tomato Blood costumes using AR. We also deployed shoppable Instagram posts, and targeted holidaymakers across Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest.

Results were bloody good! We increased 20oz Ketchup sales +27% (October vs 2019*), outside the key ketchup season.

The livestream event attracted 695,000 total views (live + replay) which were 27x over the platform benchmark.

Over 5,200 customers experienced the world of Tomato Blood at the Heinz Halloween Store, with steady traffic and maxing out at COVID-safe capacity multiple times.

On social, we leaned into authentic content with influencers and our most engaged-with post featured Team2Moms giving a live tour of the activation. The post had over 71,000 engagements on TikTok

The TikTok branded AR experience had over 12,000 UGC videos created, surpassing the 5-8K benchmark. And our shoppable Instagram retail post surpassed stopability benchmarks by over 2X.

Earned media secured 812 placements, resulting in over 600M impressions

AdAge called the campaign one of the best Halloween campaigns of 2021

*Compared vs. 2019 given the anomaly of 2020 COVID sales