Football fans hoping for a return of Heinz’s stampeding wiener dogs are out of luck this year. Everybody’s favorite condiment maker isn’t buying any ads for Super Bowl LI, because it’s found a much higher calling for that money: campaigning to make the Monday after the Super Bowl into a national holiday. Pretty accurately, Heinz argues nobody works that day without harboring a grudge anyway, plus 16 million Americans call in sick like it is (so it’s one of the year’s worst days for absenteeism), and productivity actually plummets so badly, the nation loses $1 billion. Creating a new, essentially two-day-long holiday — “Smunday,” or Super Bowl Sunday plus Monday — therefore does everybody a favor.
The talking ketchup and mustard bottles are back in a two-minute video (yes, with a quick wiener-dog cameo) to argue Heinz’s case:
To show it’s true to its word, parent company Kraft Heinz is giving “thousands” of salaried employees the day off. It’s unclear if that’s all salaried employees or not, but there are 42,000 of them in total. Since the company spent zero dollars on Super Bowl ads (which went for north of $5 million for 30 seconds), the idea is the two will cancel each other out, and the gimmick might even bring Heinz more publicity. The company also started a Change.org petition demanding official national-holiday status for Monday. If it gets 100,000 signatures, Heinz says it will deliver the petition to Congress.
