Memes meanz Heinz

Heinz and Absolut pooled their brands' power to promote a tomato vodka pasta sauce and the resulting ads are…very good indeed. 

The Heinz x Absolut Vodka campaign began last week, with a social media campaign and billboard ads around the UK. 

The ads, by Wunderman Thompson, resurrect the playful iconography of the Absolut Vodka ads from the 1980s and 1990s, by using shadows and spaghetti to allude to the alcohol brand’s distinctive bottle shape. 

Several national news publications covered the campaign, intrigued by the brands’ partnership. 

Pasta alla vodka recipes have become a social media staple ever since model Gigi Hadid shared her recipe for the dish on Instagram in 2020. 

Caio Fontenele, head of new ventures at Kraft Heinz, told Contagious that the idea to create a tomato vodka sauce came from social listening, adding that his team is constantly monitoring what recipes are trending on TikTok and Instagram, and that the brand had already brought two or three other pasta sauce flavours to market based on their popularity online. 

The Heinz team tried several vodkas, according to Fontenele, but chose Absolut in part because of its iconic brand and its connection with the 1980s, when pasta alla vodka enjoyed a spike in popularity in the US. 

Heinz’s tomato vodka sauce is only available in the UK for now, and in limited quantities. It’s not so much a new product launch as a stunt to promote Heinz’s pasta sauce range, which the brand released last year. 

But Fontenele says that he also hopes that the campaign will have a halo effect on Heinz’s wider brand, by showing the company’s innovative side. Heinz has always been good at managing its core brands, but in more recent years it has put more effort into innovation. Around two years ago, Heinz established a new ventures team, to create a culture and a space within the company where people could take risks and push boundaries. So expect more strange products and partnerships from Heinz in the future. 

We did ask Fontenele if Heinz considered using Gigi Hadid to help launch the tomato vodka sauce, but he said no, and opined that it might have pulled focus from the ingredients, which were the real stars of the campaign. 

Although he added that he’d be happy to send her a jar.

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Photo by Jacob Rice on Unsplash

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