- Wendy's hits Twitch,
Heinz draws ketchup,
Jif raps with peanut butter flow and more.
I'm Jeff Beer and this is a special Best of 2021 edition
of Fast Company's Brand Hit and Miss of the week.
For our last episode of the year,
we decided to take a walk down advertising memory lane,
casting a glance, not only at our favorite work of 2021,
but also the work that embodies where brand creativity
is heading.
Here, we're gonna count down five of our favorites.
First up is Wendy's.
Back in 2019, Wendy's dropped its namesake character
into Fortnite to destroy all the freezers
in a special food fight edition
of Epic's hit Battle Royale game.
This year, the brand took things up a few notches
to redefine what it means to play with your food
and set a new standard
for how brands get involved in gaming.
Super Wendy's World was a campaign
that infiltrated a variety of popular video games
and streamed it all on the brand's Twitch channel.
Wendy was in "Minecraft" smashing ice blocks.
In "Animal Crossing,"
she sold freezers to the lowest bidders.
She was in "Street Fighter," "Super Mario Maker II,"
and "Super Smash Brothers."
Overall, gamers spent more
than 9.8 million minutes exploring
the Wendy's video game universe,
and Wendy's became the first verified restaurant on Twitch
and ranked among the top 1% of all streamers
on the platform.
Next is Heinz.
Close your eyes, picture this,
ketchup.
Now be honest.
What do you see?
Is it a Heinz bottle or a logo?
That was the premise of one of the most earnestly fun brand
initiatives of the year,
the Draw Ketchup Campaign for Heinz.
The brand asks people to do just that, draw ketchup.
And it turns out, a whole lot of people scribbled
up some serious brand awareness.
Now let's take a look at work
from the UK's "Kiyan Prince Foundation."
Kiyan Prince was arguably the brightest young soccer
prospect in England before he was stabbed to death
15 years ago.
The "Kiyan Prince Foundation" is a nonprofit
that's been campaigning against knife crime
and for better support systems to prevent it.
The foundation this year partnered with EA sports
to make Long Live the Prince,
which brought Kiyan back to life
within EA sports FIFA 21 video game,
allowing players to select Prince for their teams
or play him as a member of his childhood club,
Queens Park Rangers.
Players can access contact information
for the foundation and learn more about it services from
within the game.
The campaign got worldwide media attention,
including raising significant awareness
for the organization fighting to make sure what happened
to Kiyan doesn't happen to more kids.
Next up is Jif peanut butter.
The brand found a way to drop into the cultural discourse
when it got Ludacris to update his rapping style
to sound more mumble modern with the help of a spoonful
of peanut butter.
Ludacris then issued the hashtag Jif rap challenge
on Tik Tok, giving users a chance to rhyme with Luda himself
in a Tik Tok duet.
Tic Tokers created enough of their own challenge videos
to collect more than 7 billion views.
Finally, let's take a brief trip into the Iceland verse.
Back in October, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta.
And part of that announcement was a long infomercial-like
fever dream peak inside the mind of Mark Zuckerberg.
Within the week, as the news cycle was still spinning
around the implications around Meta,
Visit Iceland dropped one of the funniest, timeliest spoofs
of the year.
This was a pitch perfect spot set
in a perfectly natural environment
that illustrates the power of keeping up with culture,
but in a way that isn't super weird or borderline creepy,
which brings us to our miss of 2021.
Yup, let's stick with Meta.
Not only did the Facebook parent company rebrand come
off like a "Black Mirror" episode crossed
with a magic bullet infomercial,
but the company also inexplicably kept Zuckerberg,
arguably its most controversial figure as a mascot.
Now on a scale of one to what the holy fuck am I watching?
This was way up there.
The workplace conversations here were about as natural
as the Chuck E. Cheese band.
Hello, this is great.
Corporate leaders can be great spokespeople
when they add a beating heart behind the logo.
Their humanity, their character becomes intertwined
with the company and what it stands for giving people a face
with which to associate their emotional connection
to the brand.
It's his face and more often than not, the emotion is anger.
Now this whole list is completely subjective.
So don't take this as sum definitive declaration.
Let us know what your favorite brand work of the year was
in the comments.
That's it for this week and 2021.
Thanks for watching.