A social-first slice of the action

Putting Pizza Hut back at the heart of the conversation – and on more plates.

THE HEADSCRATCHER

Pizza Hut should be the life of the party, but on social media the vibe had gone quiet. Engagement was slipping, and the brand was no longer the life and soul of the group chat.

In a world where pizza is everywhere and trends move at the speed of a TikTok scroll, just shouting about deals wasn’t cutting through. People needed a reason to talk about Pizza Hut every day, not just when the craving hit.

So how do you turn an iconic pizza brand into a social-first player that owns the conversation, fuels the crave and gets people ordering in, collecting or heading to the Hut?

40% increase in app downloads from the Hut Wednesday campaign

91% audience growth on TikTok

186% more video views

We knew Pizza Hut needed more than a few viral posts. They needed a complete social-first strategy built to win in the fast, chaotic world of online culture. So we became their always-on creative engine, building a platform that put real food, real people and real personality at the heart of every post.

From the ground up, we designed a content mix to shift the brand from ‘deal-of-the-day’ to ‘part of your day’. That meant defining a clear creative territory, setting a tone of voice that could flex from playful to crave-inducing, and planning formats that would thrive where our audience and trendsetters partied most: TikTok and Instagram.

We tapped into nano-influencers, amplified user-generated content and ran dynamic, trend-led shoots from our in-house content studio. We made Pizza Hut impossible to ignore, from reactive memes and bold cultural collabs to TikTok trends and live-streamed interaction. Pop culture became our playground, and pizza was the invitation to join in.

Whether we were stoking controversy around the best way to reheat a pizza or getting the chat going with fun ways to reuse the mini pizza box tables, we kept a close eye on what our audience ate up and what they pushed aside – feeding those insights straight back into the content kitchen.

And it worked. Our community managers turned comment threads into conversations, building loyalty slice by slice. Every post, every reaction, every cultural hit reinforced one message: good times are always on the menu with Pizza Hut.

Our Pizza Hut social-first strategy served up big wins in just six months, proving that being part of the cultural conversation pays off.

The Hut Wednesday campaign delivered a +40% lift in app downloads.
TikTok audience up +90.9%, fuelling a +190.2% jump in video views.
Overall audience grew by +25.4%, with impressions up +8.8%.
Engagements rose +42.3% on TikTok, showing the content was hitting the spot.

The results spoke volumes: more followers, more views, more crave. And with our remit now expanded to three additional campaigns (including exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the new global campaign), Pizza Hut’s slice of the social pie is only going to get bigger.