Heinz Taps State-of-the-Art AI to Design Its Next Ad Campaign

Heinz tapped an artificial intelligence-powered art generator to create a clever demonstration of the ubiquity of its brand in the condiment aisle. The company's marketing team fed a series of generic ketchup-related prompts into research group OpenAI's state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm, Dall-E 2, which conjures up eerily detailed images from simple text inputs. The results are all over the place—from a Tron-like neon-shaded bottle to a cute container in the shape of a dog—but the one commonality is that most seemed to have adopted the trademark fringe, shape and lettering of a Heinz label. The AI-powered campaign is a follow-up to an exercise Heinz held last year in which random people were asked to draw a generic ketchup bottle. Those results similarly tended to include the iconic logo. Given that Dall-E 2 is trained on hundreds of millions of images that people have posted to the web, it's not surprising that it reflects the public's conception of a ketchup bottle. Heinz Makes a Snack for Ketchup Lovers Looking to Nosh on More Sauce: Spoon Friez Jacqueline Chao, senior brand manager at Heinz, said tapping the AI, which has made a splash with its bizarre and often lifelike art on social media, seemed like a natural next step from last year's campaign. "We typed in 'ketchup' and noticed that a lot of the results looked like Heinz, with labels that resembled the iconic Heinz keystone," Chao said. "This emerging tech isn’t perfect yet, so we got some weird results along with ones that looked like Heinz—but that was part of the fun. We then started plugging in ketchup combination phrases like 'impressionist painting of a ketchup bottle' or 'ketchup tarot card' and the results still largely resembled Heinz. We ultimately found that no matter how we were asking, we were still seeing results that looked like Heinz." Heinz is one of the first brands to tap Dall-E 2 for a marketing campaign, even if just for a fun novelty stunt. But experts think the powerful image generator has the potential to transform parts of the creative business, from stock image banks to art inspiration for agencies. While this particular campaign represents an early foray into the technology, Chao sees potential for the generator to serve some use in future marketing efforts. "While we’re not experts in AI technology, we think there is a lot of potential when it comes to the role that this kind of technology can play in campaigns," Chao said. "Since innovation is always at the forefront of everything we do, when we saw AI image generation quickly becoming the latest viral sensation and people taking to social to discuss the alarming accuracy of AI drawings, we knew we needed to move quickly and launch Heinz AI Ketchup." The Dall-E 2 launch follows OpenAI's rollout of GPT-3, a text generator that can create realistic-sounding copy (and the backbone of Adweek's Super Bowl Bot), which is also beginning to find uses in bulk copywriting and writing inspiration. "Going forward, it's likely that the technology will only improve and the capabilities of what can be created will be even greater than what they are now," Chao said. "We’re excited to see how this will impact the traditional ways of creative development when it comes to ad campaigns and beyond." The 11 Most Memorable Jingles and Slogans From 1980s TV Ads