Wagner Pizza is for sharing and people love to share. So, we turned everyday online posts into real life Pizza Parties.

Anything people shared via popular social media, could end up becoming a Pizza Party. Every week we chose a post and turned that into a real life Pizza Party. Every weekly winner received a personalized mini website with a specifically composed party song, based on his post, to announce his party to his friends via social media. We did this weekly for a whole year long, which resulted in 36 Pizza Party songs, mini websites and themed Pizza Parties.

The battlefield in the category was TV. Every possible direct and indirect competitor was heavily investing in TV, with at least 10 times our budget. Wagner Pizza stood no chance emerging from the media clutter. If you cannot outspend them, then try to outsmart them. We looked into media habits of the target group and discovered there is another mass medium other than TV: Facebook. 50% of the Belgians is active on Facebook, and 66% uses it daily.

To optimize budget, the idea was carried out throughout PAID, OWNED and EARNED media. We used targeted online media, offline media, special packaging and own website/database and POS to drive traffic to the platform. The experiences of the parties were shared online and became media on their own, setting the mood about Wagner and motivating people to talk about Wagner.

A post-test among the winners and guests of the Wagner Pizza Parties revealed that more than 9 out of 10 have the intention to buy Wagner Pizzas, and 2 out of 3 had already bought one.

Even more impressive are the overall results. For an unknown brand with only one tenth of the media budget of our competitors we managed to increase the spontaneous awareness with 10% in Belgium, and top of mind awareness with 500%, making it the second best known pizza brand. There was an overall growth of 20% in sales for all varieties during the campaign.