2010 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

In just 4 weeks, we built up a community of 25,000+ Pasta lovers – making it the biggest fan page (www.facebook.com/mypizzahut) in the Arab World. Over 13,000 interactions (Wall posts, Likes, Comments) were recorded during the campaign. Another 123,000 people visited the Pizza Hut Corporate website, out of which 12% registered to receive future communication. More than 37 million ad exposures were delivered across key markets – strong visibility. Pizza Hut is now seen as the first food brand in the region to truly embrace social media.

Creative Execution

In a regional first, we developed a strong social media strategy involving consumers helping Pizza Hut launch the new offering. We turned around the campaign call-to-action from ‘Visit the Tuscani microsite’ to ‘Become a fan of Pizza Hut ME on Facebook and win a trip to Italy’ We capitalized the notion of how consumers on facebook become ‘Fans’ of pages and incentivized it to instigate participation. All the advertising was geared around this promotion and we beefed up the fan page with appealing content including videos, discussion topics, polls and promotions. We identified consumption patterns of 18-35’s and then targeted them through high-ranking portals, in addition to stimulating conversations across forums. One of the insights was these young digital savvy consumers access facebook using their mobile handsets so we developed a mobile marketing strategy to reinforce the message and bring people to the Pizza Hut fan page.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Pizza Hut wanted to announce the launch of the Tuscani Pasta amongst 18-34 year old consumers in the GCC. It was a through-the-line push, and they wanted to adapt offline direction with a traditional display campaign online yet feared it may fail to engage the consumers. Research revealed Pizza Hut's target audience primary purpose of using internet was connecting with friends and Facebook was growing exponentially amongst this group.