Building Hype and Increasing Sales for the Limited Edition Pizza Hut X KFC Partnership
In February of 2021 Pizza Hut Ireland Announced that it was partnering with KFC to create a limited edition Popcorn Chicken Pizza. In a climate of extended lockdowns and poor weather, we had to find a way to get people excited.
The Background
With the long winter months, restrictions and rough weather just not letting up we took this as an opportunity to give people something to get excited about; a meeting of two fast-food giants, a clash of flavours.
As is often the case with a global brand other territories were also running this promotion, in our case, the UK was launching early and promotional spillover from other markets was very likely. We had to make sure it was clear to Irish consumers that the pizza was coming soon and keep their attention in a cluttered food-heavy media space.
How we did it
We devised a campaign that was split into 2 phases – ‘Coming Soon’ and ‘Here Now’. This approach allowed us to build hype and have some fun on social media, and then chase down conversions for key audiences across search, social, YouTube and through influencers.
At a local level, we decided to have some fun before the global ads launched, creating our own bank of content specifically for Ireland designed to tease and then transitioning into the global videos introducing the partnership officially.
Phase 1 - ‘Coming Soon’
Teaser ads built for awareness were put into the rotation as part of our always-on campaigns on social media – showing hints of the new pizza and the partnership that’s on the way.
We had tracking in our Facebook & Instagram campaign that allowed us to build out engaged audiences who had seen our teaser content and prepare a reveal to these audiences first.
Our content was live across feed and story formats in Facebook and Instagram.
Phase 2 - ‘It’s Here!’
We were then ready to go out wide in a funnel approach with a whole new suite of visually rich brand assets paired with local level copy.
We also recruited some new faces for the brand in the form of comedian Michael Fry and Food Reviewer and Influencer Conor Ryan/IrishYumz. We kept their brief broad and set them off to make some fun content out of this bizzare pairing and show the pizza off to their vast follower base at the weekend of release.
We gave the influencers complete creative control because no one knows their audiences like they do, and the results were astounding. Engaging and fun reviews and catchy songs flooded social media for the weekend gaining over 250,000 organic views of the content combined and driving a 17% increase in followers to the brand’s Instagram page overnight.
With the pizzas beginning to pop up all over the city we had a huge increase in social media stories appearing of people losing their minds over this new topping, each one shared on the main brand pages to promote engagement and more user-generated content.
On the tactical side, our search ads were all updated and waiting to appear for any demand created from this extra attention.
The Impact
Popcorn chicken pizza sales started very strong, accounting for a massive percentage of all large pizzas purchased in the opening weekend. Our brand reach stayed strong long after our activity was ramping down as a result of all the new attention and as a first time working with influencers on an activity like this Pizza Hut was delighted with the results.
All of this extra activity led to a 67% increase in Instagram engagement and a 17% increase in followers to the Instagram page over the first 3 days of the campaign.
The views on the Influencer activity over the first 3 days were huge: over 250,000 organically on videos and 15,000 combined likes across TikTok and Instagram without any extra paid support on the content.