NARC ON BAD PIZZA.
Equal parts illuminated manuscript & street culture, we promoted a food subscription service through a hotline for the world’s worst pizza.
*THIS IS A SPECULATIVE CAMPAIGN
DEVELOPMENT
Rough sketch of the Rossano's Pizza campaign's visual design.
Rossano’s Pizza markets to the folks who buy the most pie: college kids. Being a full-time student is busy work (sometimes literally), so a fast, cheap meal goes a long way in fueling late-night study sessions. If something’s going to vie for their attention, it needs to be intrinsically shareable, carry social currency, & tap into a collective problem that every student has faced.
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Enter gross pizza. Building on Rossano’s odd blend of medieval manuscripts & street culture, we created the Pizza Snitch Hotline, where students can narc on crap ‘za alone or with a friend. We stuck to college towns with a Rossano’s location nearby, using the traditional OOH you’d see on campus, highways, & nearby shopping centers, but we were determined to advertise outside the pizza box. Working with a college ambassador agency, we got students to print, cut, & hang pull-tab flyers in hip local businesses & in nearly every university building.
The Pizza Snitch Hotline’s ultimate goal, using a mix of text messages, voicemails, & web experiences, was to find the world’s worst pizza, &, with every submission, they did. How? The worst pizza is the one you have to pay for, looping neatly back to Pizza Plus & providing students with a one-month free subscription. For the emotional damages of reliving such a terrible pizza memory, of course.
MESSAGING
NARC ON BAD PIZZA: College students, busy as they are, want a brand that meets on their level & provides entertaining social currency. This campaign combines the flashiness of street culture with the stoicism of medieval manuscripts as a comically-serious Bureau of Pizza seeks to leverage students for gross pizza evidence.
ASSETS
Rossano’s is equal parts medieval & street, so we fused the two together in picture-perfect Italio-Euro-American harmony.
An illuminated manuscript isn’t complete without a blackletter typeface, so we used the calligraphic Amador for eye-catching titles & the bending, bowing Alegreya for serif body copy.
Each color was isolated first from European art, including tarot cards, the work of Bosch, & the eponymous Rossano Gospels, before passing through the lens of modern streetwear design for a more vibrant finish. An emphasis was placed on the colors of the Italian flag to honor Rossano’s heritage, although white was swapped for a more “illuminating” yellow.
Artwork & icons took inspiration from postwar Italian posters - specifically, those that paid homage to prewar art deco sensibilities. Bulbous blobs & sharp edges twist & dance as ingredients, symbols, & the oft-forgotten bleymmes (a mythical race with faces on their stomachs) portray the liveliness of that pizza you’ve just gotta try.
CHANNELS
OUTDOOR (POSTERS)
PRINT (PULL-TAB FLYER)
SOCIAL
WEBSITE
DIRECT (EMAIL)
RESULTS
The following results only include data from the two-month run of the campaign.
Affiliate college students initially hung up a total of 423 pull-tab flyers. With replacements considered, a total of 1,245 pull-tab flyers were hung up.
Austin, TX saw the greatest number of both total QR code scans & Pizza Snitch completion rate, followed by Sacramento, CA in second for both categories & Denver, CO in third for both categories.
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Where the ad campaigns were in full effect (i.e. billboards, flyers, & campus ads), the average total revenue of Rossano’s Pizza locations within 3 miles of a college increased by 87%. The average total revenue of Rossano’s Pizza locations further than 3 miles from a college where the ad campaign was in full effect increased by 64%.
The Rossano’s Pizza Twitter account saw an increase of 12,253 followers. 6% of all social traffic purchased one month of Pizza Plus.
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In total, 1,529,625 people submitted to the Pizza Snitch Hotline website. 85% gave permission for their submissions to be shared in marketing materials.
When offered a free month of Pizza Plus, 54% of customers used the free pizza coupon. After the 1-month follow-up reminder, 32% of customers who were previously offered one free month of Pizza Plus signed up for paid Pizza Plus (compared to 6% of all Rossano’s Pizza customers). 25% of Pizza Plus subscribers purchased merch.
Total revenue increased by 74%. 5% of the total revenue increase came from Pizza Plus subscriptions. 7% of the total revenue increase came from merch sales.
