Pass the Heinz

Why it works

Half a century late, Heinz finally bought Don Draper's pitch. In a season-six episode of Mad Men, set in the 1960s, Draper showed Heinz executives close-ups of fries, a cheeseburger and a steak with no ketchup anywhere, under the line "Pass the Heinz"; the fictional client dismissed it as half an ad. In March 2017 David Miami persuaded the real Heinz to run it, re-shooting the images to match the show and co-crediting the fictional agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, in newspapers and on billboards in New York. It is studied for two reasons: as a demonstration of the power of absence, where the missing product does the selling because the viewer's appetite supplies it, and as a joyful collision of fiction and advertising history that turned a television prop into a real campaign and a wave of earned media. Heinz said it chose the work because it needed no paragraphs of copy, and it won multiple Gold Lions at Cannes that year.