Company: Papa John's Pizza
Agency: Fleishman-Hillard
Timeframe: 2007
In the 1960s, the idea of making a phone call and having a pizza show up at your front door was a novelty to American consumers, and it ushered in a new era of food preparation and dining, where convenience trumped the effort required to create a homemade meal.
Times certainly have changed, but only in that this concept of convenient cuisine has become even more extreme--so extreme that ordering a pizza can now be done with the press of a button no matter where you are, thanks, in part, to the "What's Next? Text!" campaign conducted by Papa John's Pizza and Fleishman-Hillard.
Pie In The Sky
Papa John's was already a pioneer in using technology to make the pizza-ordering process as streamlined as a Six Sigma-school manufacturing line. In 2001, the pizza company introduced online ordering at http://www.papajohns.com, but even that became archaic in relatively short order.
To get back ahead of the curve, the Papa John's team leveraged the power of mobile communications in 2007 by becoming the first national pizza chain to offer text-message ordering. It was a revolutionary idea that piggybacked off of consumers' almost-constant interaction with their cell phones--after all, research revealed that more than 48% of mobile phone owners send text messages daily. What's more, 74% of Americans ages 18-34 use their mobile phones for more than voice calls, proving that mobile communications are the path of least resistance to reaching younger consumers.
Despite the promising statistics, the team knew the program would only take off if said consumers knew about it in the first place.
"The biggest challenge was that text commerce was going to be new to everyone. Papa John's text-to-order program was the first of its kind not just in the food/restaurant business, but also the retail business," says Doug Terfehr, vice president at Fleishman-Hillard, the agency hired by Papa John's to get the campaign off the ground. "There was a major education that needed to be done to get the consumer comfortable."
To initiate the educational element, the Fleishman/Papa John's team created a Flash demonstration that gave customers a step-by-step illustration of how text-ordering works and posted it on the corporate Web site.
"That became the pillar education tool," Terfehr says. "This proved incredibly valuable. It was easy to use, easy to understand and worked at the pace of the consumer. That was a great breakthrough for all of us."
The ease of the process became the main selling point. In just four steps, consumers could be registered to text their pizza order whenever a craving struck:
1. Register at papajohns.com and save favorite orders, delivery and payment preferences with the Papa John's "Favorites Wizard."
2. Once registered, text "FAV1," "FAV2," etc. to 4PAPA (47272).
3. Papa John's then sends back a text message detailing the order and requesting confirmation from the consumer.
4. Once the consumer confirms (by pressing Y1), the nearest restaurant processes the order.
Talk Versus Text
Once the technology was in place, the team could begin promoting the ordering option, but "What's Next? Text!" had to be shaped into a story that would appeal to the media outlets that targeted consumers.
"We certainly knew this was going to be significant business news," says Terfehr. "However, we didn't feel reaching out strictly to the business press was going to reach our target consumer for text-ordering: the 18-34-year-old crowd."
Besides, the team already had the business press in the bag by securing an exclusive story in the Wall Street Journal, which debuted the breakthrough technology to business partners and shareholders. Plus, a partnership forged between Papa John's and LG Mobile Phones added an additional tech angle, as the latter company enabled high- resolution branded images to be used in the online Flash demonstration.
Reaching the consumer audience, then, would require more nontraditional media relations strategies. As it turned out, nontraditional outreach came naturally to the campaign.
As just one approach to getting coverage, the team negotiated the participation of the world's fastest texter, LG National Texting Champion Morgan Pozgar. The 14-year-old beat out more than 300 competitors by texting the winning phrase--"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocios! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious"--in just 42 seconds.
Then they courted Fran Capo, who is featured in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest talker, having been clocked at 603.32 words per minute, or 10 words a second. These two quirky record holders would face off at an event at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minn., where Papa John's hosted bloggers and traditional journalists, to see which person could order a pizza faster using his/her award-winning communications technique.
"The business press was going to cover us--the exclusive in the Wall Street Journal proved that--but we piggybacked that by conducting the texting event at the Mall of America, pitting the world's fastest texter against the world's fastest talker," Terfehr says. "Of course, texting won, and the visual of those two going at it proved to be great for TV and a big hit among younger, hipper media--therefore younger consumers."
Additional event activities held to court media coverage included:
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A giveaway of 10 enV mobile phones;
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Papa John's delivery and pizza sampling;
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A wireless laptop station where consumers could learn more about text message ordering and register at papajohns.com; and,
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Videotaping the event and subsequently creating a B-roll package to distribute to news stations across the country.
One Heck Of A Pizza Delivery Tip
Indeed, the combination of activities at the media event accomplished the team's goal of driving media and consumer awareness of Papa John's text message ordering option. The following results are especially indicative of its success:
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629 media placements totaled more than 53 million impressions, with an ad value of nearly $350,000;
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A highlight reel of the event posted on YouTube received more than 12,000 views;
- 84 influential tech and food blogs/Web forums covered the program referenced the Web demo on Papa John's corporate site;
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Within a week of the program's launch, more than 6,100 people viewed the Flash demonstration; and,
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More than 114,000 people registered their mobile phone numbers with Papa John's, opting to receive special offers via text.
Terfehr notes that the media relations campaign was so successful because it wasn't an either/or decision when it came to targeting media.
"We view new media no differently than we do traditional print and broadcast," he says. "They become part of our target list. The same way we sometimes go after a network show as our priority, we occasionally place that same importance on a blog or other online media channel. In the case of the text-ordering program, we did an online blog audit of top tech, food and pop culture blogs well in advance of our program launch so we could get smart on their format and style. It proved to be quite successful." PRN
CONTACTS:
Julie Crabill, 415.591.8411, [email protected]; Pamela Johnston, 212 629-8445, [email protected]
Business Vs. Pleasure
The Papa John's "What's Next? Text!" campaign seemed like fun and games when the world's fastest talker and texter faced off in a competition at the Mall of America, but it was also an integral piece of the company's business growth and success. Thus, it had to be handled delicately to appeal to two very different audiences--internal and external--and to incorporate the right mix of digital and traditional elements.
"The text-ordering option was something developed by operations, not PR or marketing, [so] clearly this was a business objective for Papa John's," says Doug Terfehr, VP at Fleishman-Hillard, the agency that partnered with the pizza company to execute the campaign, in reference to the client's willingness to adopt nontraditional strategies to achieve a business objective. "As long as the communications objective achieves a business objective, selling in digital strategies should not be difficult. You just have to put measurement in place. Show it can drive incremental business or create greater loyalty/frequency among your consumer base."
The fact that Papa John's is a company led by forward-thinking managers didn't hurt, either.
"Selling in PR opportunities for new channels is not [seen] as a challenge here," says Tish Muldoon, director of public relations for Papa John's. "It's more like, 'How fast?' and 'What's next?' Our top management understands the value that public relations brings to the brand."
The Secret's In The Sauce
The Fleishman-Hillard/Papa John's communications teams learned the value of multitasking when they undertook the "What's Next? Text!" program for the national pizza chain. In terms of managing multiple programs without dropping the ball, Doug Terfehr, VP at Fleishman, offers this advice:
"This project was going on right in the middle of another major program last year for Papa John's--a partnership between the pizza company and Universal Studios on the DVD release of Spider-Man 3. To keep it all moving forward, we were fortunate to have a pretty deep team that could handle the multiple projects, and a very skilled PR team at Papa John's that is used to working at a fast pace. We kept it straight by over-communicating the details, but not getting bogged down if something wasn't going to work out like we planned it. We just moved on to the next idea for quick solution. It proved to be the exact recipe for success."