As an agency, we spend a good chunk of time thinking about interesting media opportunities. Where can make a strong impact on the audience? And oftentimes, we pick our spots based on where we can make a big impression without a giant budget.
For The Watering Bowl, we realized quickly that the staff was the brand, so we made sure they all had branded TWB shirts with fun, relevant lines on them. For Lake Regional, we created an entire video series just for an internal audience of 1,545 employees who needed to believe in the new positioning before we could reasonably expect patients to buy in. We even wrapped a giant, custom RV for Eye Thrive that is as much a roving billboard as it is a beacon of hope for kids in need of prescription eyewear.
Needless to say, from the moment we started working with Toppers Pizza to redefine their brand voice, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on their pizza boxes.
There’s no more intimate brand experience than the vessel that delivers your product and sits on a kitchen counter or coffee table the entire time your audience enjoys it. That’s roughly 210 square inches of prime real estate you couldn’t buy if you wanted to.
So then what?
Knowing that the boxes would likely outlive an advertising campaign, so we created them under the brand umbrella of defining what “Wisconsin Style” means. Each box tells a whimsical, hand-illustrated story about a specific attribute of Wisconsin Style pizza–fresher, faster, later.
“Fresher” features authentic Wisconsin Cheese Loggers toiling away to bring you the freshest of the fresh stuff, straight from the source. “Faster” shows a delivery driver defying the odds by conquering the elements to bring you the goods. And “Later” is all about insomniac cows roasting pizza around a campfire. Obviously.
But when we said we look for any opportunity to make a strong impression, we meant it. We utilized every nook and crevice available on those boxes to connect with the customer who so graciously invited us into their home.
Even if not many people read the bottom of the box, we wanted to make sure they had a chance to smirk as they shove them down into the recycling bin. We utilized elements of the illustration on as easter eggs on hidden flaps as well as on the website.
We even brought our playful characters to life with a social campaign to introduce the new boxes.
For us, turning brands into darlings means thinking about the entire customer experience and finding meaningful ways to engage with them. And if that means we get to make a hidden reference to Home Alone on the top of a pizza box, all the better.