Rewind: Catsup vs. Ketchup, And Why Peggy Olson Was On to Something With Heinz
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So Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce lost the Heinz ketchup pitch, and the beans account will likely go by the wayside as well.
But what exactly did these fictional Mad Men lose? In real-life 1968, H.J. Heinz poured $21 million into U.S. advertising, according to Ad Age’s ranking of top spenders that year. That was a lot of money then, but the marketer was only ranked No. 83 in spending, putting it behind companies like Pan American airlines (80), Schlitz (49) and five tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynolds (10). Some things don’t change: Procter & Gamble was No. 1, just as it is today.
Of course, Mad Men’s storylines don’t always square with history. While JWT walked away with the Heinz account on the show, the marketer at the time was entrenched with Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), which took the ketchup account in 1964 from Maxon. Beginning in 1964 the shop unleashed a series of ads positioning slow-pouring Heinz as better than competing “catsups,” with their “runny water.” In the DDB spot above, Heinz is prevails in an Old West saloon duel, emerging as “the slowest ketchup in the West. East. North. And South.”
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