29-05-2025
Heinz Is Ketchup, To AI
What happens when you enlist the powerful new technologies we call AI in the service of iconic brands?
One example is the achievement of Heinz ketchup in validating their market dominance by showing how art imitates life, and AI imitates humans.
On Linkedin, Noor Salam Khan talks about how Heinz 'mastered' generative AI with a ground-breaking ad campaign:
'This campaign wasn't just clever; it was pure genius, reminding us that sometimes, the simplest ideas, when paired with cutting-edge tech, are the most powerful,' Khan writes. 'They put (AI) to the ultimate test. They fed generative AI models (like DALL-E) the simple prompt: 'Draw ketchup.' And guess what? Time and time again, the AI spit out images that were strikingly, unmistakably... Heinz. The bottle shape, the keystone label, that iconic red – it was all there. It was like the AI had gone into the collective consciousness and pulled out the very essence of 'ketchup.''
The Pursuit of Attention
So many brands have used AI image creators to present radically attractive or fantastic results, to dress up a company's products and services to inspire a target audience. The color, the pizzazz, the spectacle is what has drawn so many of us to the handiwork of the LLM in a diffusion model, where the program adds noise, prior to de-noising into a novel, coherent result.
But Heinz went a step further, asking AI what ketchup looks like, without putting a thumb on the scales.
Here, the company was betting that the LLMs, in their mining of human responses and visual environments, would come back with something that looked like Heinz. And it did.
Check out the article for the full layout.
Yesterday's AI Tools
Looking at the campaign itself, you can see how the visuals that AI came up with were so very 2024…
That is, Dall-E and similar tools, at that time, were not proficient in creating text. So what you have in many of these results is a recognizable ketchup bottle that has the Heinz keystone label, but with a scramble of letters on it, like: IANCS – KEED – KUP.
Or simply: KEMP.
Despite this profound lack of spelling prowess, the model did come up with numerous interesting examples of ketchup bottle context, including a ketchup bottle floating in a pool, a bottle that looks like a lava lamp, and a Heinz-like product enshrined in a stained glass window.
As the younger generation might say: Noice.
Rapid Image Generation Innovation
Fast-forward to 2025, and we have a brand-new image generation model with ChatGPT 4o that is actually excellent at writing text, and a lot more precise when it comes to aggregating information for visual creation.
So I tried it for myself – I simply asked ChatGPT 4o to draw ketchup.
Here's what it came up with:
So I asked it, without any further prompting, to add text to the label.
Here's where things got interesting – ChatGPT actually asked me what text I would like to add. I asked it to add its own text, and choose its own font.
The result?
Carefully emblazoned on the photorealistic bottle was the word 'Heinz.'
Below it, in the keystone: 'Heinz tomato ketchup.'
Now, you could argue that this is simply a numbers game – that the AI returns these results because it can see that more bottles of Heinz are sold on the market than any other kind of ketchup.
But as Khan points out, this kind of work 'hits us in the feels' – giving us A very direct sense that Heinz is ketchup.
Presumably, only brand dominators can do this, but it also provides other businesses with a lot of potential ideas.
In some ways we're embarking in the process of talking to AI, making conversations that include its own thoughts or research, and that's having an impact on nearly every part of our lives. That's what AI integration is really all about – it changes things. We end up coexisting with other intelligent beings, even if they only have hardware instead of human bodies. And we play off of them to inspire ourselves. In some ways, that's what it's all about.
