Great American Soup
Great American Soup was a brand of canned condensed soup owned by Heinz. Introduced in 1970 to compete with Campbell's soups, it never caught on with consumers. While Heinz still sells condensed canned soups to the restaurant and industrial markets, Great American Soup had disappeared from supermarket shelves by the mid-1970s, and would be all but forgotten except for the only television commercial ever created to promote it.
Commercial[edit]
Heinz tapped advertising legend Stan Freberg to create a commercial for Great American Soup. The commercial starred Ann Miller and Dave Willock as a married couple. Willock's character comes home from work saying "Boy, am I hungry! What kind of soup is that?" whereupon his wife (Miller) tears off her apron and house dress to reveal a sequined dancing outfit.[1] Their kitchen falls away, replaced by an elaborate Broadway-style set with 20 dancers whom Miller leads in a Busby Berkley-esque song-and-dance number extolling the praises of Great American Soup. The number culminates with a tap-dance atop an eight-foot can of soup that rises out of the floor, after which their kitchen returns and Miller's character falls into her husband's arms.
"Emily," he deadpans, "Why do you always have to make such a production out of everything?"
With an estimated production cost of $154,000, the commercial was one of the most expensive commercials produced to that date.[2] There were rumors that the cost of the commercial consumed most of the brand's promotional budget, leaving little money to buy air time and none to create another commercial, although a shorter version with newsreel-style narration by Freberg was produced. Unfortunately the commercial, while praised for its artistic value, was less successful at brand promotion. Not only did Great American Soup fail to attract customers, the word "Heinz" did not appear prominently on the label, and many people thought the soup was a Campbell's brand.[3]
References[edit]
- ↑ "Ann Miller's "Heinz's Great American Soup" Costume". at the National Museum of American History
- ↑ Debbie Foster; Jack Kennedy (2006). H.J. Heinz Company. p. 67. ISBN 9780738545684. Retrieved 2015-04-07. Search this book on
- ↑ "Remembering Ann Miller and the Campbell's…oops…Heinz Great American Soup Commercial". 2013-04-12.
External links[edit]
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