In-The-Box Thinking Led To New Pizza Hut Giveaway

Pizza Hut is running a "refill" promotion next week, giving away more than 50,000 pizzas, although the campaign is BYOB: bring your own box.

The "Repizza" campaign by Leo Burnett is driving trial of a new "light and airy handcrafted crust." Customers can visit a Pizza Hut location on Dec. 4 with any pizza box (even one from a competitor or the frozen food aisle) and Pizza Hut will refill the box with one of 50,000 pizzas it's giving away that day.

Since being named AOR for the brand in April, Leo Burnett has been working to connect Pizza Hut to a younger audience, said group account director, Scott Lyons. In this instance, the brief was fairly simple: a new handcrafted crust, lighter and airier than the original stuffed crust, or original pan.

“It’s a more everyday crust,” said Lyons, of the new offering. Because it’s a lighter option, customers can “get [their] hut hit more often.”

The timing is intentional because consumers are more inclined to purchase pizza over the weekend, so come Monday, when people return to their weekly routines, they have an excuse to get a free pizza—and likely, leftover pizza boxes that they can cash in.

A 15-second video shows customers rushing into a Pizza Hut store with unidentifiable empty pizza boxes, led by a young man wearing boxer shorts and Ugg style boots under his winter coat. As others behind him line up, a stack of blurred out pizza boxes grows in size, with one clearly visible Pizza Hut box thrown into the stack.

Consumer research for the new handcrafted crust shows that it’s outperforming the competition on taste, so driving more trial was key, said Lyons. “[We’re] showing competition because we're encouraging people to bring in any pizza box … even though they just had pizza recently.”

The video and cut downs are in market now, across DOOH, OLV, social and digital, with paid media by Wavemaker.

[videopress FWi2Wtxq]