Thinking Outside the Box

Pizza Hut Gets Personal with Hand-Tossed Pizza Portraits that Wow.

When the Zeno Pizza Hut PR team was challenged to generate consumer and media buzz around a product launch for the brand’s new Hand-Tossed Pizza, we got to thinking. How can we make a personal pizza that much more personal?

To embrace the uniqueness of each new pie, we treated the pizza crust as a canvas. Next, we engaged one of the world’s top food artists, UK-based Prudence Staite to design dozens of pizza portraits made in the likeness of top media personalities.

So, how did it all come together?

Cutting through the Crust

1. The out-of-the-box idea included collaborating with an artist and watching how she went about her process.
2. When Prudence arrived to Pizza Hut HQs in Plano, Tex., she got right to work in a quiet, window-less kitchen (by request) where she could work with minimal distractions. She took top talents’ headshots, sketched their faces to practice the overall shading and dimensions, and then translated this onto the new hand-tossed pizza crusts, using only Pizza Hut toppings as decoration.
3. It didn’t take long for the entire Pizza Hut team to see that this was getting pretty serious, so serious that Prudence was able to crank out an average of eight amazing portraits per day for a week!
4. Once ready, the pizza portraits were hand-delivered by the Zeno team to producers, hosts and writers across all media platforms – and the response was nothing short of phenomenal.

From earned media coverage across the trifecta of national morning shows – TODAY, Good Morning America and Fox & Friends – to national coverage on USA Today, AP and Ad Age, along with tweets from top-tier sports media personalities like Trey Wingo, Scott Van Pelt, Colin Cowherd and Darren Rovell, one simple idea has driven 245 media placements and nearly 50 million impressions to date.

Numbers aside, the launch of Hand-Tossed Pizza from Pizza Hut and the use of an out-of-the-box idea to promote it proves the value of celebrating the uniqueness that defines a brand’s consumer base. I know I’ll personally never look at a pizza the same way again!