Media Intelligence for Attention and Brand Performance
The situation
If you live in Canada and love a classic pan-fried pizza, you’re probably familiar with Pizza Hut. Maybe you’ve dined at the restaurant, made your own sundae for dessert, or, as a kid, celebrated your love of reading with their Book It! program and a well-deserved personal pan pizza.
And because you live in Canada—and clearly love good food—you also probably know that this country offers a lot of options when it comes to quick-service restaurants.
From towns to cities, you’ve got national institutions like Tim Hortons colliding with global brands like McDonald’s and Subway (seriously: count the number of Tim Hortons in the next small town you visit).
So, how does a brand keep up while standing out? Product development, advertising campaigns, new menu innovations… the list of expensive options goes on, without a clear direction of what one will move the needle. Fortunately, we were here to deliver the goods: the data.
(We left the pizza delivery to the pros.)
The challenge
Digital-first behaviour favours delivery-oriented incumbents. For the pizza segment of the market, that means Domino’s, 241, and Pizza Pizza.
While Pizza Hut has been long-perceived as a delicious dine-in pizza option, they’re not top of mind when it comes to delivery options: but they’ve been working hard to change this, offering a multi-channel approach that includes mobile app ordering, and the brand is putting money behind increasing adoption.
This means attracting new and younger consumers while keeping the same growth in the restaurant.
Mobile apps + pizza + younger consumers. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Not exactly.
With only a fraction of the budget and market size of its competitors, Pizza Hut needed some cost-effective methods to figure out where to begin, and more importantly, how to unlock consumer insights to drive efficient and outsized growth.
The Ask
Pizza Hut had seven creative messages that would be used at different points over their fiscal year. Each needed support, and an understanding of how to do that. This meant finding the right sequence, the relative effectiveness to determine the appropriate weight, and understanding the best environment to place the ad.
On top of that, they needed to know the impact of equity and innovation messaging vs.—and in combination with—price and promotion. These insights would help inform the right sequencing of messaging, as well as the appropriate relative weight levels.
Here’s how we got Pizza Hut what they needed to know.
Audience
We recruited Pizza Hut’s target customers from our pre-built community for Pizza Hut.
Technology
Participants were split equally across three screens, including TV, mobile, and laptop, and viewed the same clutter reel content in different orders depending on their viewing session (see diagram below).
A broad range of video content comprised the clutter reel (check out our concept testing case for more). Participants were equipped with mobile EEG headsets that record levels of attention, emotional connection and memory encoding. The video was synced to the brain response of participants at the millisecond level through our Audience Brain Measurement system, and after viewing, participants completed an exit survey.
Analysis and Advice
Data was analyzed both by playlist order, then aggregated and compared by screen, which included second-by-second analysis by screen environment. This let us answer two critical questions for Pizza Hut:
What was the value of equity + innovation messaging compared to/in combination with price + promotion
What media environment was best suited to which advertisement?
The Results
Greater Attention from Media placement, and greater Consideration for the brand.
With our insights, Pizza Hut discovered that running equity + innovation messaging first made consumers much more receptive to all Pizza Hut messaging.
What’s more is that running equity + innovation messaging prior to promotional messaging lifted the impact of promotional messaging, too. People paid more attention, they emotionally resonated more, and they encoded more to memory.
Pizza Hut revealed through Brainsights’ cross-screen analysis of its advertising where to place each of its assets for the greatest impact, thus gaining valuable contextual media insights to maximize investment returns.
