To truly “Win on Taste”, Pizza Hut introduces limited time offer products throughout the year. These products previously have been linked to sales cycles. In 2019, our strategy was to re-define the role of limited time product offers to become culturally relevant pizza eating occasions.

Halloween provided the perfect opportunity to drive sales with a limited time offer. Hence, Pizza Hut’s innovation chefs created “The Wicked Black Pizza”, a creation inspired by a monster’s wide-open mouth, featuring a WICKED black base with cheesy ‘teeth’, topped with Pizza Hut’s famous toppings.

Our objective was to create a Wicked Black experience that felt less like a product offer and more like a cultural celebration. With a focus on driving sales but also becoming the most talked about pizza brand throughout Halloween, our experience launched across social media, Pizza Hut’s website, aggregators and in over 150 stores in the UAE and Oman.

For our socially savvy millennial consumers, “the feed eats first” so we wanted to ensure that the experience was both talked about and worthy of being captured “for the gram”. With experiences being key to our audience, our packaging design was created to be truly immersive.

We created three different illustrations to bring to life the horrific origin story of the Wicked Black and showed them being visually held in place by the mouth of mythical beasts from horror stories and folklore.

Orders placed for The Wicked Black during the week of Halloween also came with access to limited edition haunted stories, from Pizza Hut’s own ‘candle-lit’ audio book, Tales from The Wicked Black. The tales were accessed via a unique snapchat code which lured pizza eaters to an original spooky story online.

We worked with three award-winning illustrators to create limited edition horror inspired packaging artworks each specially crafted around the Wicked Black’s distinctive product design. Our Pizza packaging designs drew inspiration from some of the genres most culturally recognized themes and characters, when the lid was finally lifted our consumers came face to face with a completely unexpected and spine chilling feast.

As part of an integrated experience, our design work extended across in store collaterals, OOH assets and spooky social teaser content. But it didn’t stop there, during a special screening of Maleficent at Dubai Mall we hijacked the beginning of the movie and ran an advert where we cut the film and scared the audience. Once the movie had restarted we handed out samples of the Wicked Black to all the people in that screening. We had also invited influencers to be a part of the experience.

As Wicked Black was a limited time offer, and a short campaign period, we created demand that exceeded expectations (the dough sold out!) - selling over 5,600 Wicked Black Pizza’s in just less than 3 weeks. Our takeaway and online sales ensured that our audience were making the most of the occasion, gathered at home eating the Wicked Black, over 2000 pizza eaters dimmed the lights and listened to our spooky tale.

Not only did 470,000 people view our social content videos online, but we truly became a brand that talked with and not at our pizza eating fans, with over 3,000 social engagements over a 3 week campaign period. Our influencers loved it so much that 12 of them even promoted it free of charge for us resulting in our PR and influencer efforts reaching over 730,000 consumers across both markets.