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

Business Insider

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.

Category

Transcript

Recommended