Heinz partners with vampire influencer to promote 'Tomato Blood' ketchup
To celebrate the limited-edition Halloween product, Heinz taps E.J. Marcus, who takes on the role of “Toby the Vegetarian Vampire.”
UsenB
Plenty of brands have worked with influencers for social media campaigns, but few can say they’ve partnered with a 280-year-old vegetarian vampire. In the latest campaign from Heinz, the condiment brand does exactly that.
To promote the relaunch of its “Tomato Blood” packaging, a limited-edition design timed with Halloween, Heinz worked with Wieden+Kennedy New York to create a fictional vegetarian vampire who prefers the taste of Tomato Blood to actual blood. Heinz tapped actual influencer E.J. Marcus, who has almost 400,000 followers on TikTok, to play the vampire character known as “Toby the Vegetarian Vampire.”
Throughout October, people can follow along with Toby’s adventures and his passion for Tomato Blood on Heinz’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. So far, Heinz has posted four TikTok videos featuring Toby, including one of him going on a “hot veggie vamp walk”—a parody of the “hot girl walk” trend on the platform—with a bottle of Tomato Blood. Another follows Toby on a visit to Six Flags, where he orders a bowl of the amusement park’s limited-edition “Bloody Nacho Fries,” but asks for all of the ingredients besides Tomato Blood to be removed.
@heinz_us a nightly routine is SO important. get heinz tomato blood and u too can go on hot veggie vamp walks #hotveggievampwalk #vegetarianvampire #fyp ♬ original sound - heinzSeveral of these videos are cross-posted as Reels on Heinz’s Instagram, where the brand has changed its bio to read “toby the veggie vamp.” On both TikTok and Instagram, Heinz posted a portion of a PSA-inspired video in which Toby encourages other vampires to become vegetarians and only consume Tomato Blood. The spot originally aired during the AMC premiere of “Interview With the Vampire” on Oct. 2.
“The next time you want to eat someone, I hope you’ll reconsider and go vegetarian,” Toby says in the video. “I hope you’ll switch to Heinz Tomato Blood. Because humans are people too.”
The hashtag #heinztomatoblood, where TikTok users can find Heinz’s videos starring Toby, currently has 1.2 million views. Along with this TikTok and Instagram content, Heinz and Toby will take over several channels on the entertainment wiki site Fandom and host a “special vampire-themed activation on Twitch” later this month, according to a press release.
This social media campaign is the latest push from Heinz to promote its spooky seasonal product. Last year, the brand released a costume set that included its Tomato Blood product as an alternative for fake blood, and in 2020, the company challenged TikTok users to create gory Halloween costumes that included the product as fake blood. The hashtag created for that challenge, #HeinzHalloween, racked up over 5.1 billion views on TikTok.
