STUPID/SMART
The Banger Blog · a Stupid/Smart breakdown
New · 2025

Look Familiar?

Heinz Ketchup · Rethink Toronto

From Heinz.

The insight

People choose their fries deliberately and take whatever ketchup arrives, because ketchup is a commodity.

The idea

The trapezoidal fry box is the same silhouette as the Heinz keystone. Photograph the boxes, show no product.

The Stupid/Smart of it

Stupid: Spending a global budget photographing other companies' packaging, with no bottle, no label and no red anywhere.

Smart: A ketchup ad with no ketchup is reckless, until you notice the logo has been sitting in every restaurant for seventy years.

Why it works

Only a brand with 150 years of shape consistency can be recognised by silhouette alone; the absence is the proof of the equity.

Once seen it cannot be unseen, so every fry box in the world becomes free Heinz media, permanently.

The magic

Noticing at all. The execution is trivially simple; the observation is the entire asset.

Idea-poweredIt works when you describe it out loud. You could brief this. Survives paraphrase.

The way in

The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in:

Point at something that already looks like youHide the product until the end
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