In 2021, the Heinz Tomato Blood program targeted families, celebrating the ingenuity of using Heinz as fake blood for Halloween costumes: “If you have Heinz, you have a costume.” The program successfully drove sales, engagement and positive sentiment. But in 2022, the brand decided to pivot, broadening beyond its traditional family target to speak to a completely new audience: young millennials. This pivot would allow Heinz to address an audience whose cultural consumption year round is driven by Halloween lore and, as a result, cement the brand within Halloween culture.

This audience required us to rethink our approach. After all, for young millennials Halloween means much more than just making costumes. It’s a genre of entertainment they live and breathe.

BECOME A VEGETARIAN VAMPIRE. EAT HEINZ TOMATO BLOOD.

To convince vampires to go vegetarian–and drink Heinz Tomato Blood–we enlisted Toby, a fictional 280 year old Vegetarian Vampire influencer who prefers the taste of Tomato Blood.

We started by casting a wide net with a :90 recruitment film starring Toby making an appeal to vampires to spare human lives and drink Tomato Blood. The film aired across social and TV.

Simultaneously, we had to show Tomato Blood could keep up with Toby’s hectic vegetarian vampire lifestyle (even though he’s dead). We built Toby’s social media presence piece by piece with 64 social posts on 4 platforms across 5 weeks to show how integral the product was to his life. Content leaned into trends on TikTok, making him feel like a real influencer.

We reinforced our message through geo-targeted OOH and media placements in interest-based communities where vampires spend their days (nights).

Halloween holds an outsized importance for our audience, young millennials. For them, it’s about clout, creative expression, extreme fears–and celebrating the wonderful lore that surrounds Spooky Season. Beyond October 31st, Halloween is an eternal driving force of their cultural consumption and identity (see: Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, What We Do In the Shadows, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, American Horror Story).

To resonate with young millennials, we aimed to mobilize the perfect advocates who’d catapult us into the Halloween conversation–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, vegetarian vampires drink Heinz Tomato Blood. We treated the campaign as a real marketing effort to convince this thriving subculture to spare human lives and go vegetarian.

Our vampire influencer Toby was the face of every campaign touchpoint where vampire fandom thrives.

The :90 hero recruitment film went live on 9/26 across Heinz US and Canada social channels (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube). PR, in English and vampiric, launched 9/27. The film was broadcast during ABC’s premiere of Interview With The Vampire on 10/2.

Toby posted daily social content exclusively at night throughout October.

Billboards typeset in a custom vampiric font ran in famous vampire tourism cities: Salem, NOLA, Portland and Chicago. A QR code on the billboard led curious humans to a TikTok translation.

High-impact media placements included: Toby enlisting popular streamers in a “Heinz Tomato Bloodless Challenge” on Twitch to kill without blood, sponsoring Fandom’s NYC Comic Con event, taking over Fandom.com wikis of other famous vampires, and infiltrating vampire subreddits through sponsored posts, conversational ads and engagement prompts gifting Reddit gold.

Through this campaign, we successfully activated our subculture of vampire enthusiasts and engaged with a broader audience of vampire-loving and Halloween-obsessed millennials to drive impact across the board.

Business Impact: Our campaign led to a +12.5% lift in sales of Heinz Ketchup October 2022 vs. 2021, a tall order given inflation and price increases.

Engagement Impact:

- 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%

- 10x increase in daily average follower growth

- 30% increase in total profile likes

Earned Media Impact: Our campaign garnered 457.2M+ earned impressions, 83% over our benchmark goal.

Industry Impact: Our campaign was recognized by TikTok CAP University as best-in-class use of the platform.