Pizza Hut

Inviting the world to stop and melt with Pizza Hut

A young man with a nose ring bites into a slice of pizza, the sun brightening his face

(  Services  )

  • Brand & Media

With 19,000 restaurants in 130 countries worldwide, Pizza Hut is among the most-known pizza brands in the world.

Moreover, after more than 60 years in the biz, Pizza Hut is known for keeping its customers coming back with new, mouth-watering menu items and flavour combos. 

To kick off the launch of its latest product, “Melts,” Pizza Hut approached DEPT® for help creating a comprehensive social media awareness campaign with 40 high-reach creators on TikTok and Instagram.

The right creators for the job

With a timeline of just two months to create and launch the campaign, we dove straightaway into Step 1 of the project: Finding 40 top-notch influencers that Pizza Hut could partner with. 

Given our tight schedule, we had to move fast with our research. At the same time, finding the right creators for the job required careful attention to detail. Not only did we need to find the creators whose particular flavour of content paired well with the Pizza Hut brand, we had to ensure that their personalities, approach, and audiences were suitable as well.

Transcript

The City’s Newest Cheese Pull Where to get it and how it tastes — that’s what we’re checking out today. Let’s go! And a little spoiler up front: it’s also super affordable. We’re at Pizza Hut at Potsdamer Platz. Since the beginning of October, they’ve had a new product we want to try today: the so-called Melts. Basically, it’s crispy baked dough folded over various fillings. Kind of looks like a pastry pocket. I tried the vegetarian version of the Melts with bell pepper, pepperoni, and mozzarella filling. On top, there’s an oregano-parmesan crumble. Oh my god, folks — I loved it so much! The Melts are super crispy, a little bit spicy, but also slightly sweet thanks to the peppers. And they have the best cheese pull ever. But that’s not all: every Melts order comes with a dipping sauce. The vegetarian one comes with a spicy sweet chili sauce. Just dip the Melts right in. It’s seriously delicious. Ten out of ten, folks! You can get a pair of Melts with sauce for €6.90. They were so good — I even grabbed a few to go. Now tell me in the comments: have the Melts melted your heart yet? And who are you taking with you to try them? See you next time.

Mouth-watering goals

Pizza Hut Germany’s Melts campaign had two main goals. First and foremost, we had to increase the brand’s reach and generate awareness for the new dish. And, with a name like Melts, it was always clear that the best way of accomplishing this would be to showcase the ooey-gooey, cheesy deliciousness of the product through influencer content.

Secondly, we also wanted to generate a ton of engagement among the target audience through the influencer campaign. This was especially important to Pizza Hut Germany, who wanted us to  ensure that the campaign was simultaneously highly visible but also encouraging folks to jump in and participate in the campaign.

Close up of a cheesy, delicious Pizz Hut Melt with tomato dipping sauce.

Sticking to the cheese, staying away from the cheesy 

In collaboration with our chosen pool of 40 creators, we helped generate a total of 51 individual pieces of content on Instagram and TikTok for the campaign.

To ensure that the final output met Pizza Hut’s goals for the campaign, we provided each influencer with a brief that gave them plenty of creative freedom—a crucial factor to producing content that was high-quality and, most importantly, authentic. 

After all, for any social media campaign to work, the content can’t be too cheesy… even for a product literally oozing with the real thing.

The choice to prioritise creative freedom also ensured that we hit it off with each influencer from the beginning of our work together, and our communication with one another was consistently positive and uncomplicated.

Another key component of our briefing strategy was deceptively simple but highly effective: Humour. We realised the best way of generating engagement was generating LOLs, which was especially effective for Pizza Hut’s Gen Z and young Millennial (“Zillennial”) audience.

Ultimately, the numbers we generated through the campaign speak for themselves:

  • 40 creators who contributed to the campaign and promotion of the new ‘Melts’.
  • Reach of over 14 million followers.
  • Generating more than 150,000 engagements.

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