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

Originally published in AdWeek, Aug 1, 2022.

The brand is one of the first to rely on OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 art generator.

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.

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