The best sports ad of 2025 didn’t feature a single athlete 🍅

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Earlier this month, something happened in China that was a great example of what we call "Ambush Marketing" and it came from the ketchup brand, Heinz.

November saw the kick-off of China’s 15th National Games. It’s a massive deal over there. The sponsorship fees were naturally astronomical.

Heinz could have tried to outbid the competition. They could have hired a gold-medalist sprinter to hold a bottle of sauce. But they didn’t.

Instead, they created “Tomato Athletes”.

If you look at the little green stem on top of a tomato (the calyx), it has five leaflets. The creative team realised that if you bent and twisted those little green legs, they looked remarkably like human silhouettes in motion.

By simply twisting and bending the leaves, they created silhouettes of 34 different athletes representing different sports.

The caption? "Every tomato that strives to win is in Heinz."

It was brilliant.

Heinz paid $0 for sponsorship and just bought standard billboard space at popular locations and placed these ads, letting the public make the connection themselves.

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That's a wrap for today! Stay tuned for the next edition.

Thanks,
Luv