Pizza Hut was struggling to connect with Gen Z, who knew us solely for our red roof, font and, well, their 6th birthday party. Despite being a fondly remembered pizza pioneer, unlike our competitors, we weren’t cutting through the cultural conversation anymore. To win with this trend-starting, absurdist humour-loving, Gen Z target, we needed to show up in more culturally relevant ways, on platforms they were active on.

So when we saw an opportunity to take a viral AI-generated video that looked exactly like our brand, we hopped on it immediately and began to create a cultural moment for real pizza fans so they could taste a piece of AI.

Pizza Hut turned a viral AI-generated pizza commercial into reality by transforming their brand and restaurant into a real pizza place, with a custom designed pizza that remained true to the source video, all within a week of the video going viral.

The campaign was created to resonate within the Gen Z demographic who spend most of their

time online. So when we identified a viral AI-generated pizza commercial that the demographic was loving, we decided to make AI real. We transformed a Pizza Hut location into a Pepperoni Hug Spot, changing all our social handles and Google Map location info, and developed a new pizza recipe based on the AI video.

First, we acknowledged that Pizza Hut had seen the viral AI pizza commercial and how it looked eerily similar to our brand. Then we asked the public if they’d like us to bring AI to real life. There was a huge social response, so within 7 days we transformed a Pizza Hut restaurant into a real Pepperoni Hug Spot and developed/launched a special pizza for the grand opening. The ingredients and recipe were also inspired by the pizza in the AI commercial. On launch day, we sold out all our Pepperoni Hug Spot pizzas and gave our online fans something they could eat in real life.

Over a mere one-week period, we were able to garner a large number of impressions with the activation on a shoestring budget and sell out of the Pepperoni Hug pizzas.

In leading news outlets like BlogTO, Daily Hive, Trend Hunter, Yahoo!, and others, we delivered a total of 20 million impressions (+185.7% higher than the previous campaign). We increased social impressions by 78% compared to our monthly average over the last 9 months, reaching 276K of our intended Gen Z audience.