Kraft Heinz knows how to make you to pay attention

The commercial jingle will never die. The classic advertising device’s longevity is as impressive as it is surprising. Despite just about everything else in the advertising industry changing over the past two decades, it remains one of the few core tools many marketers still rely on. It’s why when you read, “Liberty, Liberty, Liberty” you’ll be singing the Liberty Mutual tune in your head. 

Kraft Heinz CMO Todd Kaplan knows this. He also knows that in order to really make a jingle stick, it helps if you enlist legendary artists to sing it. Which is why this week, the company’s Lunchables brand dropped its reimagined version of the 2002 Buckwheat Boyz brainworm “Peanut Butter Jelly Time,” featuring Lil Jon and Twista. 

This is what Kaplan calls “marketing that happens,” and it’s part of a broader strategy across the company to find innovative ways to play with culture that actually impact the business. It’s a strategy that has been led by Heinz, whose “It Has To Be Heinz” work launched in 2023 has helped that brand grow by 6% and boost sales by $600 million. Now the company is looking for ways to scale that impact across all of its brands. 

Passion Points

“Consumers are overwhelmed with messaging and all sorts of advertising all day, so you can’t just approach marketing as advertising, says Kaplan, who joined Kraft Heinz last year after a 17-year run at PepsiCo, finishing as CMO of the Pepsi brand. “When an ad comes on your TV, you’re typically looking at your phone. When a pre-roll ad hits you on YouTube, you hit the skip button. When an email from a company comes into your email box, it goes right to spam. Just because the marketing message was delivered doesn’t mean it was received, in terms of people’s engagement. So it’s about trying to find ways to prioritize high engagement moments, especially through passion points like sports, music and entertainment, for people to care more.”

The company’s marketing is on a roll. Just in the past month or so, it’s launched a Kool-Aid collaboration with Nike, seen that brand become a major (and hilarious) plot point on Seth Rogen’s Apple TV show The Studio. It tapped into March Madness with Ore-Ida by capitalizing on BYU’s run to the Sweet 16 with leading scorer Richie Saunders, the great-grandson of the brand’s founder.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, this week’s Kraft Mac & Cheese dropped the “Forever Macaroni Necklace.” The brand knew about the generations-long tradition of little kids making macaroni necklaces for their moms, and took it to the next 14-carat level.

These are more than just one-off projects, but part of a coordinated effort to get our attention—and affection—by combining the brand names we already know with unexpected forays into culture. 

“We talk about this idea of being culture in versus brand out,” says Kaplan. “A lot of brand advertising comes down to, ‘My brand stands for x, and I’m trying to do Y,’ as opposed to really listening to culture, bringing it in, and finding those logical connection points.”

Here’s how Kaplan plans to keep it rolling. 

Beyond awareness

Take a peek inside the kitchen cupboards and fridges of about 94% of American households, and you’ll find a Kraft Heinz product. 

“If every house has one of our brands within an arm’s reach, this isn’t about brand awareness and telling people what we are,” says Kaplan. “It’s telling people about why we matter and how we can connect with them.”

Which brings us to mustard. On Kendrick Lamar’s hit 2024 album GNX, the track “tv off” featured Lamar yelling “MUSTAAAAARD” to shout out his producer Dijon McFarlane, also known as Mustard. Brands, of course, jumped on the moment. Heinz went a step further and teased a collab with Mustard during the Grammys on February 3rd, which will see a limited edition mustard flavor and packaging collab with the “Not Like Us” producer dropping this summer.

“A condiment and culture? That’s a new idea for people,” says Kaplan. “We have the opportunity to find and tell these really rich and interesting stories, because you already have the starting point of people knowing who your brand is. They have a contextual use case for the product. So how can you build upon that in a really interesting way? That’s what’s quite exciting.”

Agency and In-House

Kraft Heinz brands work with a laundry list of agencies, perhaps most notably (and awarded) in recent years has been the relationship between Heinz Ketchup and creative shop Rethink . But one constant has also been the presence of Kraft Heinz’s in-house creative team called The Kitchen, which is behind work like the Mac & Cheese necklace and Heinz x DJ Mustard collab. 

“Historically, the marketing industry, with agencies and clients, had this level of formality and, candidly, I don’t love how transactional a lot of it feels, where agencies pitch, clients buy, agencies sell,” says Kaplan. 

Instead, he prefers that all parties involved work as much as possible as co-conspirators in service to the brand. For The Kitchen, that means really embedding inside each individual brand. 

“They’ve done a phenomenal job of really embracing this kind of real-time speed, rather than acting like an agency, waiting for the next brief,” he says. “Now the brands have a person from The Kitchen in the flow and in the right conversation. So you’re in the formal business review, and you’re in the creative discussion, and you’re not playing catch up.”

Ultimately, it’s that mix of traditional agency relationships, in-house teams, and the commitment to culture that has fueled Kraft Heinz brands’ work. That commitment comes with risk and reward. 

“You need to lean into the imperfections of the cultural moments,” he says. “You have to hop on it when you have to hop on it, or you might miss it. But also know that it’s not a strategy to just wait for the next cultural moment either. You want to create those moments as well. So it’s a balance.”

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