CMO Todd Kaplan shares Richie Saunders' relation to Tater Tots and how it's part of Kraft Heinz's new marketing strategy

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Todd Kaplan, Kraft Heinz North America's CMO, talks about transitioning into his role, the brand's collaboration with Richie Saunders, and the 'marketing that happens' mindset.

Transcript

00:00You know, I talk about with my team this concept of product marketing versus brand marketing, right?

00:05Iconic products are one thing, iconic brands are something people tattoo on their body, right?

00:14It's really been great joining Kraft Heinz coming from PepsiCo in so many years over there.

00:19You know, one of the biggest differences I've seen over at Kraft Heinz is just the depth and breadth of the number of brands

00:26and the amount of brands and categories we play in.

00:28And, you know, at Kraft Heinz we have 70 brands that span 50 categories and we have like 96% household penetration.

00:36All of our brands, when you think about what's in your kitchen, what's in your refrigerator, in your pantry,

00:41everybody in America has at least one or two or three of these brands.

00:44And so it's been, it's such a great opportunity as a marketer when you think about it

00:47because we have an awareness issue, we have a distribution issue.

00:50It's really about how do we make these brands relevant, these 150-year-old, in many cases, brands to today's culture.

00:56So it's been a lot of fun, really been enjoying it.

00:58And so there was this really fun moment when every year in March Madness, everyone knows the NCAA tournament,

01:03there's always these fun, quirky stories that come up.

01:06And so it was about a week or so before the tournament started this year.

01:10And there's a guy by the name of Richie Saunders on BYU, Brigham Young University in Utah, their basketball team.

01:17He's their star player.

01:18And they were making a run to get their tournament berth.

01:21And he revealed in a post-game interview that his great-grandfather actually invented the tater tot

01:28and was one of the founders of Oreita, which is one of our brands.

01:32Oreita, obviously, is an amazing brand with tater tots, french fries, all sorts of potato products.

01:37And we had no idea then.

01:39So, of course, we had to move very quickly within about 36 hours, got in touch with him,

01:44all over, Tech figured it out, signed him to an NIL deal.

01:48And we built an entire program literally in the speed right as the tournament was just getting going

01:53to try to drive even more conversation and bring this all to life.

01:57We made a tot clock where every time after the BYU would win, there'd be a 24-minute tot clock

02:03where you could get free tater tots.

02:05We had a lot of fun.

02:06We changed the name of our brand on social media to Oreitchie.

02:10I mean, there was a lot of just really fun things that really started to come with this.

02:13And it just started becoming one of those stories as they won and won and won.

02:16You know, the team started chanting tater tots, tater tots when they're in the locker room

02:22with him.

02:23You saw, you know, all the guys on TNT, Charles Barkley, everyone's talking about, they're

02:27calling him the tot king on SportsCenter.

02:29I think there was a fun clip where he was even interviewed talking about how 75% of the

02:33questions we were getting about tater tots and Oreita listening about basketball.

02:37But they made this amazing run to the Sweet 16.

02:40It was a lot of fun.

02:41And we actually drove more conversation, more engagement with the brand than every NCAA

02:46partner combined.

02:48Yeah, we're really instilling this new mindset in marketing at Kraft Hein, and we're calling

02:53it marketing that happens.

02:55And the real mindset is really about marketing that goes outside of the lines of paid media.

03:01And it's not just about running an ad on TV or having an ad show up in your social

03:05feed.

03:05It's about what's the kind of marketing that's going to, you know, people, a friend is going

03:09to text you about.

03:10It's going to organically be in your newsfeed.

03:12You're going to see earned media coverage kind of start to trickle in.

03:14And so to do that requires a different behavior than your typical kind of agency client dynamics.

03:21And so we've started these sessions.

03:23I call them collaborativity sessions, where it's basically trying to flatten the organization,

03:28where if you think of a lot of client and agency dynamics, there's this formality around

03:32agencies are pitching stuff, clients are buying stuff and selling.

03:35It's like a very transactional, formal, hierarchical relationship.

03:39But at the end of the day, agencies are just people, no different than, you know, we have

03:43at our company.

03:44And so it's just getting just different people all together.

03:46And we call ourselves co-conspirators to kind of build these ideas together and get kind

03:51of to the core crux of the idea and a little bit of a brainstorm.

03:54And then once we find ideas that we like, then we talk about the execution.

03:57We can start to build and move quickly.

03:58And we've turned a number of really fun ideas around quite quickly at the speed of culture

04:03that have really done quite well for us.

04:05So it's been a really fun way to kind of bring our brands into the modern culture.

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