With Super Bowl Sunday fast approaching, Pizza Pizza’s chief marketing office Pat Finelli is looking to score a touchdown.
Last year’s event was the third busiest day of 2009 for the Toronto-headquartered pizza chain, moving over 40,000 pizzas, 100,000 individual chicken wings and 30,000 chicken bites on the Sunday of the game. Finelli is looking to increase those numbers for 2010 by bumping up Pizza Pizza’s media spend for this year’s game by 15%.
The company’s pre-Bowl ad blitz began last week with an Ontario-focused direct-mail push, and continues this week with a three-day (Wed. to Fri.) buy on radio in Southern Ontario. Today, a new landing page went up on the website, and the brand will be twittering deals on its feed all week as well. The internet has become an important sales medium for the brand, he says, with 22% of sales now coming from the website.
The buy focuses on traditional media, he says, and plenty of it leading up to the big game.
‘We’re using web, radio tags and not only flyer drops, but also newspaper print,’ he explains. ‘We’ll have ads in different newspapers on Friday and Saturday, and an ad in the [Toronto] Sun on Super Bowl Sunday.’
Finelli, who handles campaigns and media buys internally, is also the voice of the radio spots. He says he’s been promoting new products and deals such as its ‘Plenty For $20’ in conjunction with the weekend.
Pizza Pizza has more than 600 locations in Ontario, plus three new locations in BC, one in Winnipeg and one in Regina.