2023 Winner
SilverBest Integrated Campaign - Budget Under $250,000
SilverBest in Retail
Pizza Pizza
"Fixed-Rate Pizza"
Zulu Alpha Kilo / Media Experts
"Fixed-Rate Pizza"
Zulu Alpha Kilo / Media Experts
Pizza Pizza may be Canada’s largest pizza chain, but it still has to fight for every order in the mercilessly competitive pizza category. Deals are so commonplace in pizza that consumers have come to ignore them. Their challenge was to create and promote an offer that would break through, even though Pizza Pizza had no menu innovation to announce and no massive media budget to work with.
Inflation raged at nearly unprecedented levels in Canada in 2022. The cost of living was soaring, with food prices leading the way. And the cost of pizza was rising even faster. Cheese costs had already risen 8.4% year-over-year. A few days after one of the largest interest rate hikes in Canadian history, Pizza Pizza created the “Fixed-Rate Pizza”: a fixed price on an extra-large pizza that customers could lock in for a full year. No matter what happened with inflation or interest rates, at least your pizza rate would be the same.
They introduced the offer with a 30-second explanatory video that parodied the financial messaging in market at the time. The story was placed with local, national, and business media. PR push was supplemented with a paid campaign to drive impressions and conversion, which included digital programmatic advertising and digital OOH, as well as a mention in Pizza Pizza’s regular flyer drops.
Inspired by the success of the program's first six months, Pizza Pizza decided to extend the offer through 2023. They also expanded the campaign, adding more paid media, including a television commercial. The commercial looked, sounded, and felt like a bank ad and even made winking references to some notorious Canadian examples of financial ads of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The challenge Pizza Pizza gave us wasn’t just to break new ground for the brand; it was to defy the dynamic that drives the category. Their task was to create a proposition for the brand that would generate conversation, interest, and, most importantly, sales – without a price cut, new menu items, or the budget for a big media push.
The agency planned the campaign to launch just a few days after the Bank of Canada was scheduled to announce another interest-rate hike. When the announcement came, it turned out to be the biggest increase in 40 years. As everyone was talking about the impact of the increase on their variable-rate mortgages, they helped lighten the mood by treating pizza as a financial product.
The agency launched with a PR-driven push, supplemented by a small paid campaign, including digital programmatic and digital OOH. All communications pointed to a landing page with a tongue-in-cheek, pre-approval application form.
The program was an immediate hit and it generated over $8 million in sales in the first six months and earned 91,000,000 free impressions in media from the Toronto Star to CTV News to Bloomberg and even The Wall Street Journal – not publications that typically cover promotions from Canadian pizzerias. The overall media budget was $165K for paid media and $25K for PR, which outperformed the media buy with a return on advertising spend of 2,805%.
For every dollar spent on media, production or PR, the campaign generated $28.05 in sales chain-wide since the launch of the program.
The offer has generated more than $23.7 million in sales and is slated to sell nearly 2 million “Fixed-Rate Pizzas” by the end of 2023, making it one of their most successful offers ever.
Inflation raged at nearly unprecedented levels in Canada in 2022. The cost of living was soaring, with food prices leading the way. And the cost of pizza was rising even faster. Cheese costs had already risen 8.4% year-over-year. A few days after one of the largest interest rate hikes in Canadian history, Pizza Pizza created the “Fixed-Rate Pizza”: a fixed price on an extra-large pizza that customers could lock in for a full year. No matter what happened with inflation or interest rates, at least your pizza rate would be the same.
They introduced the offer with a 30-second explanatory video that parodied the financial messaging in market at the time. The story was placed with local, national, and business media. PR push was supplemented with a paid campaign to drive impressions and conversion, which included digital programmatic advertising and digital OOH, as well as a mention in Pizza Pizza’s regular flyer drops.
Inspired by the success of the program's first six months, Pizza Pizza decided to extend the offer through 2023. They also expanded the campaign, adding more paid media, including a television commercial. The commercial looked, sounded, and felt like a bank ad and even made winking references to some notorious Canadian examples of financial ads of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The challenge Pizza Pizza gave us wasn’t just to break new ground for the brand; it was to defy the dynamic that drives the category. Their task was to create a proposition for the brand that would generate conversation, interest, and, most importantly, sales – without a price cut, new menu items, or the budget for a big media push.
The agency planned the campaign to launch just a few days after the Bank of Canada was scheduled to announce another interest-rate hike. When the announcement came, it turned out to be the biggest increase in 40 years. As everyone was talking about the impact of the increase on their variable-rate mortgages, they helped lighten the mood by treating pizza as a financial product.
The agency launched with a PR-driven push, supplemented by a small paid campaign, including digital programmatic and digital OOH. All communications pointed to a landing page with a tongue-in-cheek, pre-approval application form.
The program was an immediate hit and it generated over $8 million in sales in the first six months and earned 91,000,000 free impressions in media from the Toronto Star to CTV News to Bloomberg and even The Wall Street Journal – not publications that typically cover promotions from Canadian pizzerias. The overall media budget was $165K for paid media and $25K for PR, which outperformed the media buy with a return on advertising spend of 2,805%.
For every dollar spent on media, production or PR, the campaign generated $28.05 in sales chain-wide since the launch of the program.
The offer has generated more than $23.7 million in sales and is slated to sell nearly 2 million “Fixed-Rate Pizzas” by the end of 2023, making it one of their most successful offers ever.
Credits
Agency: Zulu Alpha KiloChief Creative Officer: Zak Mroueh
Executive Creative Director: Brian Murray
Associate Creative Director/Copywriter: Jonah Flynn
Associate Creative Director/Art Director: Michael Siegers
Art Director: Duncan Porter
Designer: Ana-Marija Vlahovic, Crystal Huang
Account Team: Alyssa Guttman, Erika Dafoe
Strategy Director: Heather Segal, Cameron Fleming
Client: Pizza Pizza
Clients: Adrian Fuoco, Amber Winters, Raymond Luk, Adam Williamson, Susanna Rodrigues
Media Agency: Media Experts
Media Team: Nicolle Williams, Matthew Traynor
PR Agency: spPR
PR Team: Sonia Prasher, Nikita Shivdasani
Production House: Zulubot
Producer: Tim Lynch, Sarah Dayus
Motion Editor: Miguel Natividad
Original Music: Noah Mroueh, Zulubot
Mac Artist: Jeannette Downes