Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Heinz Ketchup Anticipation (Joke) Ad

Hey, we all know about how Heinz used to use the fact that their thick, rich ketchup took forever to pour out of the bottle as a plus, and then used the Carly Simon song: "Anticipation" to help drive this point home. Well, maybe with an analogy, they could make us identify even further with this anticipation experience. Because after all, some of us know the anticipatory ecstasy that fills our hearts while we hold the bottle of ketchup up over our hamburger for ten minutes without getting any ketchup, only to have it all unexpectedly dump out at once onto our burger and cover it all up like Vesuvius did to Pompeii; but some of us are not familiar with this, one of the most pleasurable things in this life; and for them, they need to be shown an analogy to other wonderful waiting-related joyful experiences so they can process the blissful euphoria that is waiting for the ketchup to start flowing.

So here's what I would suggest: Why not show someone in another, easily-relatable waiting-oriented experience, just so they can then associate it with the ketchup thing, and it could really get their mouths watering! So how about this? Show a long line of people waiting in the DMV to get their driver's license renewed, and they're waiting there all day, bored out of their minds. Oh, but this is no ordinary DMV, and they are in actuality not there to renew their driver's licenses, but rather, they're all waiting with hamburgers in their hands to get some ketchup! (Or maybe some of them could be waiting with French fries.) And so by the time they get up to where they're dispensing the ketchup, their burgers or fries are all cold and stuff, and everyone has a miserable experience, um, I mean, a wonderful time! And so then everyone could relate to how awesome it is to wait all day for your ketchup to come out of the bottle! Right? Oh, and they could play that Carly Simon song: "Anticipation", and when she sings: "It's making me wait", they could show that there are armed guards at the DMV preventing anyone from leaving (!). So waiting for the Heinz ketchup is mandatory!

Oh, but I guess if they did that armed guards thing, competing brands of catsup could make ads accusing Heinz of kidnapping and false imprisonment by "making (people) wait" for their ketchup all day. And then they could show people wasting away in tiny prison cells, and say that waiting for the Heinz ketchup to start flowing is like being condemned to an eternity in some prison hell-hole purgatory, where some monstrously maniacal jailbird will make you his "bitch". And if only you had used Hunt's catsup, then you would have been spared such a hellish experience! (Oh, but here's an old ad for Hunt's catsup that shows a whole other kind of bizarro nightmare world you'll be condemned to if you eat their catsup):


And apparently, if you keep Hunt's catsup around your house for long, you get infested with giant vermin, like this (Help! Call Orkin! {Just kidding!}):


And here's a really fun blog post about ketchup & art: