The Campaign

The core idea was to cheer people’s Christmas holiday season’s emotion, helping them to remind special season with a little bit of nostalgic surprising news, to make them feel their dream of childhood could came true, along with picturing happy Pizza party with family. We wanted to present Domino’s Pizza serious about the reindeer pizza delivery project, and identified the company’s official press release as the ideal way to underpin their seriousness. Moreover, this also provided us with an opportunity to position a brand with a higher purpose, that of allowing people to picture the perfect Christmas, along with their pizzas.

The Brief

<Overall Budget> $85,839 (exclude agency commission) <Breakdown of costs> Movie Shooting $41,830 / Website Development $13,508 / PR $30,501 / Total $85,839 <Paid Media budget> $30,501

Creative Execution

We issued the press releases in three phases: the first was to announce the reindeer pizza delivery plan (this was done through a formal written press release); the second was to release a video showing the progress being made in training the reindeers; the third and final piece was to announce the regrettable postponement of the plan (this was also done in the form of a written release) due to the unforeseen hurdles found. With just 2 written press releases and 1 video, the campaign was able to be executed at low cost, yet was still able to sustain media attention for a month.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

On December 24, Domino’s Pizza Japan achieved its highest sales ever in its 30-year history in Japan with 162% up vs 2015. The campaign was picked up by numerous media, including 18 TV news programs, and, against the paid media $30,501, succeeded in generating $3,876,421 in ad value and Media ROI 12,709%. Moreover, the number of tweets generated was 34,472 (organic tweets: 9,716; retweets: 24,756), with many retweets of news articles by media outlets, which led to increased awareness and understanding of the project. The median number of followers for Japan’s Twitter users is 300, and, based on this number, we can calculate that 300×34,472?more than 1 million people were reached through tweets. Moreover, 97% of the posts were positive and contributed greatly to strengthen engagement. (Source: Own analysis using social listening tool ForSight)

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

By using the brand’s official PR machine to announce its plans to have reindeers deliver pizzas to consumers’ homes, Domino’s was able to execute the campaign at low cost. The appeal of the wacky initiative itself was enough to attract massive media coverage and public interest.

Our strategy was to equate ordering a pizza to inviting people over for a party. To do so, we first thought about what would make people want to have a home party and came-up with the idea that, if a real reindeer was to deliver the pizza, this would make any party special and worthwhile. To realize this on a limited budget, we needed to generate excitement and anticipation through traditional news outlets which are still highly viewed amongst Japanese as a preferred channel for entertainment and news. Japanese morning news shows are topical, light hearted and entertainment focused. Seasonality combined with novelty are a perfect mix for free air time and talk-ability amongst Japanese.