Heinz actually uses the ad campaign pitched by Don Draper in 'Mad Men'
It's said that life imitates art. That seems especially true if you're a ketchup company, and said art contains a bunch of free ideas for selling ketchup.
Heinz is pulling its latest ad campaign straight from the smoke-filled boardrooms of Mad Men's Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.
The condiment brand plans to run a set of billboards and print ads cribbed from a pitch Don Draper made to a fictionalized version of the company in the AMC series.
The ads are stark and minimalist in the understated style typical of Draper, the consummate purist. Each consists only of a mouth-watering food close-up and a slogan: "Pass the Heinz."
"It's simple, and it's tantalizingly incomplete," Draper says in one of his signature ruminative pitches.
The unimpressed Heinz executives on the show put it a different way: "It feels like half an ad."
Their real-life modern counterparts were evidently more receptive to Draper's high-minded nonsense. It probably helps that tying an ad to a popular TV show ensures that several articles like this one will be written about it, guaranteeing free publicity.
The ads even came complete with a typewriter-style press release set in the show's fictional universe.
There's no word on whether the stunt might stir up a classic agency showdown between Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and DAVID Miami, the company's current (and very real) ad agency.
Topics Advertising
Patrick Kulp is a Business Reporter at Mashable. Patrick covers digital advertising, online retail and the future of work. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a degree in political science and economics, he previously worked at the Pacific Coast Business Times.
