Pizza Hut Restaurants has been at the heart of the casual dining sector since the 80s. With chain restaurants suffering rapid decline in recent years (over 1,400 insolvencies happened in 2018/21019), we had to ensure that Pizza Hut continued to attract guests to its 245 Huts.

We were set the challenge of ensuring Pizza Hut stayed front of mind, despite the rise of independent restaurants who were bucking the casual dining trend, and so our objective was to achieve mass reach on a lean budget.

We had to take a fresh look at the brand, its customers and the wider market to get a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour, with the goal of finding nuggets of insights to shape our approach.

To do this, we executed a listening project to look back at online conversation surrounding Pizza Hut and its competitors. The project was split into phases: identifying key drivers for target audiences to visit, our most talked about products and areas of improvement for Hut operations and services. This gave us tangible, real life insights to inform our annual social comms and paid media strategy.

Our paid media strategy combined running ‘always on adverts’ around key products (‘icons’) and product offerings (Sunday Buffet, 7 Day Buffet) to our target audiences (millennials and pre-families) while including targeted campaigns at niche tribes (Vegans, Young Professionals) and traffic driving campaigns (41% Off, Book A Table, Gift Card) to assist conversion.

Our ad objectives for the campaigns were split between awareness and traffic, favouring awareness as reach was the primary goal of our activity. Learnings from previous campaigns showed that ads with an awareness objective would still drive traffic, which influenced our approach, ensuring we’d deliver maximum return on investment.

Our unique approach of applying insights, while continuously executing our test and learn strategy by adapting both creative and copy, delivered incredibly positive results for PHR, which clearly translated on social to our key audiences, smashing all KPIs.