Why is this work relevant for PR?

Domino’s is popularly known to engage with topical and trending topics in real-time in a meaningful way throughout the year. So, when Saikhom Mirabai Chanu won India their first Olympic medal at the Tokyo Olympics 2020 and the entire country was celebrating it, we knew we had to associate ourselves with and own the moment completely. So when the olympian said she wanted pizzas to celebrate her win and we offered her free pizzas, every major online and offline news outlet covered the story and the brand garnered a lot of positive sentiment from audiences across the country.

Background

In July 2021, The Tokyo Olympics were in full swing with fans all around the world stuck to their screens, rooting for their countries. This excitement was also extended on social media with posts of hope, praise and support. The Olympics have always had an emotional association of bringing people together with it and we wanted to leverage the trending topic on twitter to break through the clutter and own the conversation around India’s participation and achievements to generate organic PR and virality.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Mirabai Chanu had sparked joy and hope in the country and we knew we wanted to celebrate that joy with her. So when we saw our audience amplifying her statement, we knew what we had to do to give back to the olympic medallist and express our gratitude while also engaging with our audience. We decided to offer her free pizzas for life and immediately rushed to social media to make this announcement. We even chose to amplify the announcement by replying to our audience’s tweets asking us to treat her with some of our pizzas.

Describe the PR strategy (30% of vote)

Our strategy has always been to keep our eyes and ears open for any trends or moments. So we wanted to leverage the Olympics conversations and own it completely. When we heard that Mirabai Chanu said “First of all, I will go and have a pizza. It has been a long time since I ate it” after winning the first Olympic medal for the country that year, we didn’t leave any stone unturned to make her wish come true.

Describe the PR execution (20% of vote)

When we heard what Mirabai Chanu said in her statement, we wanted to congratulate her and offer her free pizzas for life. So, we decided to keep it simple and ensure we keep her in the front and centre of our tweet announcing the offer. We rushed to twitter to congratulate her on her Olympic win and after having made the announcement, we contacted her team within a few hours to kickstart the celebrations. We sent our delivery team to her residence in Imphal with pizzas for her entire family and neighbourhood, in order to make this celebration even more special.

List the results (30% of vote)

With this move, we not only managed to bring a smile to an Olympic champion’s face and form a bond with her by delivering the food she craved for most after her win, but we also lifted the spirits of and were showered with love from the rest of the country. Our announcement started to go viral, with celebrities, influencers, and journalists around the country like Nidhi Razdan tweeting about us, memes being circulated across social media, and our tweets making over 500 headlines across all major online and offline publications in the country, including Aaj Tak, India Today, The Quint, Mad Over Marketing, etc. This virality soon led to us engaging with more than 315,555 and reaching 3,005,979 people on Twitter alone. We cannot cover the true reach of our campaign since the major spillover effect that it had across the media was intangible