Top 5 food and beverage marketing ideas you need to know about right now

Ad Age expanded its “Creativity Top 5” series to include new roundups of our favorite special-interest campaigns and ideas from brands. This week, we look at some of the latest innovations in the food and beverage space. Visit our site each Thursday for a new list of niche campaigns from the past month, and catch up on all of our Top 5 rankings here. 5. Hi-Yo, Silver! Away! A bloodthirsty Viking with a long list of grievances is won over by the offer of a Heineken Silver in the first TV spots for Heineken’s lower-calorie, lower-carb beer. The category once belonging entirely to Michelob Ultra now also includes Heineken Silver, Modelo Oro, Bud Light Next and Corona Premier. Heineken is devoting $100 million to the Heineken Silver launch this year, flipping its branding from Heineken to Heineken Silver at big sports events including the U.S. Open and Formula One. More commercial spots are coming too, said Erica Roberts, chief creative officer of BBH USA. “Under this platform, Heineken Silver is poised to rewrite culture's most bitter endings, past and present,” she said. “This epic Viking saga is just the beginning.” 4. Pizza Hat Pizza Hut is partnering with Chain to release a reversible bucket cap that resembles two of its most iconic properties—its red-roofed restaurants on one side and its Tiffany lamps on the other. The Hut Hat, which costs $35, marks the beginning of a partnership between Pizza Hut and Chain, a Los Angeles-based pop-up that serves food based on dishes from popular food chains and also sells merchandise. “Those Pizza Hut Tiffany lamps are some of the most iconic pieces of New Americana design,” Nicholas Kraft, a co-founder at Chain, said in a statement. “They elicit such joy and fond memories—and let’s be real: they kinda look like bucket hats all on their own.” 3. Let the Nugget Wars begin KFC’s reintroduction of chicken nuggets is a big deal for the brand, and as a hero spot from MullenLowe suggests, a potentially big problem for neighborhoods. “We wanted to take the idea of craveability to the max,” Lindsei Barros, creative director at MullenLowe, said in a statement. “Dial ‘want’ all the way up to ‘need-right-this-second.’ Add in suburbia and some lighthearted chaos and what do you get? A product launch that’s cinematic, fast-paced, and fun.” KFC has gone years without a proper nugget on its menu, last offering them in the mid-1990s. 2. Absolut tribute Absolut Vodka’s print ads of the 1980s and 90s were some of the most distinct and effective of their time. Now they’re being reinterpreted to support a collaboration between the Swedish vodka brand and Kraft Heinz for a tomato vodka pasta sauce that was recently launched in the U.K. The campaign from Wunderman Thompson Spain pays homage to the iconic Absolut ads, featuring their straightforward design and slogans—only with a Heinz twist. The taglines take off on the Absolut style, tweaking it to read “Absolutely Heinz. Ridiculously Good.” Each of the ads incorporates Absolut’s distinct bottle design. 1. McDelivery McCaptured McDonald’s Columbia is promoting its delivery service through a campaign that captures what the restaurant calls the “happy chaos” that comes the moment that food is delivered. The campaign from DDB Columbia utilized the “McDelivery Crew” from McDonald’s restaurants to take pictures as they arrived with food deliveries through cameras attached to their hats, capturing the reactions of recipients. The best photos of the hundreds that were taken were selected for the campaign and blown up and displayed at restaurants. “This action allowed us to demonstrate that sometimes happiness only takes a second to appear,” DDB said in a statement. The campaign was for the company Arcos Dorados Colombia, a master McDonald’s franchiser.

Top 5 food and beverage marketing ideas you need to know about right now

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