The best brands find ways to insert themselves into the moments folks are ALREADY savouring.

The world’s largest hot dog sculpture recently returned to New York’s Times Square.

It stretches a whoppin’ 65 feet long, comes pre-loaded with mustard, and attracts thousands of photos every day.

But to Heinz, it had a massive glaring problem.

What, a hot dog, with NO KETCHUP?

Rather than sponsor the installation or build another stunt nearby, Heinz worked with the sculpture’s artists to position a billboard directly above it.

The ad shows a bottle of Heinz Ketchup pouring onto the hot dog, making it look as though the sculpture itself is finally being finished.

The execution is wonderfully simple, and super fun.

Heinz didn’t have anything to do with creating the attraction.

BUT it dabbed on a memorable finishing touch.

That idea has become a hallmark of the brand. Heinz rarely asks consumers to imagine where its ketchup belongs.

It finds moments where people have already taken notice, and inserts itself so naturally that the advertising feels pretty much inevitable.

One of the themes I return to in I Need That is that positioning isn’t something you say about yourself.

More like it’s an idea you reinforce over and over until it becomes part of how people see the world.

For Heinz, the message isn’t that it makes ketchup. (We all know.)

It’s that some foods are blatantly incomplete without Heinz.

Fun fact: the world’s largest actual hot dog was a 669-foot (over 10X the length of the New York sculpture) fully edible one made in Paraguay in 2011. It was chopped into about 2,000 servings for the public after the Guinness record was certified. (And YEP, it had ketchup!)

That’s the difference between awareness and positioning.

So what if anyone and their AI can make an ad for ketchup?

Heinz has spent decades branding completion.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.