Sewer Delivery

Background

Pizza Hut and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles go way back. From co-branded toys and video games to a live musical tour, Pizza Hut has long been a favorite of those radical reptiles. Unfortunately, many of our fans are now either Splinter’s age or too young to know who that is. So with the Turtles returning to theaters in a bodacious, new, animated movie from Seth Rogen, Pizza Hut saw a unique opportunity. Our goal was to recapture the love of nostalgic fans while creating a whole new generation of Pizza Hut lovers.

Creative Idea

Since the Turtles are huge fans of Pizza Hut but can’t be seen above ground, our idea was to have our customers help deliver pizza straight to the Turtles in the sewers. We called it Sewer Delivery.

Execution

How do you deliver to the sewers? With the latest in manhole technology. Gamifying the Pizza Hut delivery experience, we sent consumers into the streets with piping-hot, virtual pizza on a quest to find hungry Teenage Turtles lurking in the sewers. Fans were challenged with locating manholes, defeating hungry mutants, and delivering pizza to Raph, Donnie, Leo and Mikey in AR for a shot at winning sweet merch, movie tickets or free pizza delivery for a year.

Powered by Niantic/8th Wall, we built a WebAR experience that provided several unique ways to engage. Participants could scan image trackers connected to Pizza Hut pizza boxes or track their immediate surroundings and drop a manhole to deliver pizza to the sewers. To increase replayability and surprise fans, we leveraged Niantic’s Lightship VPS (visual positioning system). This created a mapping system that links the AR experience to real-world locations. This included a customized VPS Map view that allowed participants to discover and navigate to locations where Turtles or a Mutant is waiting underneath a manhole.

Sewer Delivery was a 360° campaign that included an animated broadcast spot, film integration, limited-edition Turtle packaging, social media promotion including a Turtle appearing as a VTuber on Twitch and a PR stunt in which we piloted actual Sewer Delivery in the subways of New York City. In the home of the Turtles, people who texted a turtle emoji were surprised with pizza delivery at specified locations underground in the subway.

Results

Sewer Delivery was a cowabunga-level success for Pizza Hut, garnering over 1.4 billion media impressions, including coverage by outlets like CNN, Time Out and Insider. Hundreds of thousands of people played the AR game, making 1.1 million deliveries to manholes all over the map with thousands sharing photos of the Turtles they found on social media. The result was the dramatic return of 3.2 million Pizza Hut customers who placed an order for the first time in several months or even years. By turning all those overlooked manholes into a fun way to engage with the brand and win free Pizza Hut, we won back nostalgic fans and created a whole new generation of teenage pizza lovers.