Boston Pizza
BP in Bed

The Challenge

Boston Pizza is one of Canada’s leading casual dining restaurants with over 175 stores in Canada. Takeout and delivery (TOD) has been a small but growing part of its business over the last ten years however, as Canadians and particularly millennials, are more likely to order in. With the rise of food delivery options like UBEReats and Foodora, Boston Pizza’s takeout and delivery (TOD) business has been suffering. Suddenly, BP wasn’t competing with other casual dining restaurants that had their own fleet of delivery cars; it was now competing with basically any restaurant in the country. In 2018, the brand wanted to take back some of that TOD business.
But with so many other priorities - menu changes, restaurant upgrades, and other LTOs - the brand needed to make a lot more noise than their $50K budget.

The Insight

“Product news” is a tried and true way to get consumers interested in your brand. But how does one create news around pizza? New flavours? New ingredients? Thin crust? Thick crust? All of these are possible, but none are “news”. Further, all of those things are about pizza. They’re not about takeout pizza. So the brand contemplated about what is specific to takeout pizza. And there’s one thing about takeout pizza that hasn’t changed in fifty years – the box.

The pizza box is still the same corrugated, slightly grease-stained cardboard box that it’s always been. What if the brand could improve that? It would put BP back in the TOD game because delivery boxes are only associated with TOD. The brand needed the right time to launch it.

The One-line Idea

Just in time for Father’s Day! – introducing BP-in-Bed. The brand created a custom-designed delivery box that could morph into a serving tray so that Dad could enjoy breakfast in bed on his big day.

The Plan

The plan was to make this entirely about Father’s Day. In the marketing world, Mother’s Day has been getting a lot of attention in the last few years, but Father’s Day is still very much an afterthought. The agency thought it could exploit this finding. Given that brand was relying on shares and blogger interest to do media work, it needed a promotional video to get the word out. The team decided to parody the world of design-porn – one that Apple has used so successfully with each new iteration of the iPhone. It used slo-mo macro shots combined with spectacular reviews from critics to create a rapturous launch of a pizza box. Given that the genesis of the box was design-led, the agency decided to focus seeding on design blogs usually devoted to cool innovations in the world of design and tech. In a pay-to-play world where, in most cases, only the videos that clients pay for people to see actually get seen, it was a gamble.

The Results

BP wanted the campaign to increase takeout and delivery (TOD) sales on Father’s Day weekend by 2%. It did a lot more than that. With zero media dollars spent, the BP-in-Bed video was shared more than 160,000 times. The decision to target serous design blogs was the right call – as the video itself was taken and re-edited dozens of times to fit the content formats of design publications like LADbible, Highsnobiety, and even GQ!

Across the various platforms that have posted the video, it has received more than 7.3 million organic views. The campaign has generated more than 568 million organic impressions. The hype surrounding the BP-in-Bed box generated a spike in TOD sales of 4.66% vs the same Father’s Day period in 2017 (a 233% increase over the 2% objective). As a result, SSSG increased by +20 basis points, and average guest check improved by 2.9% over a year ago.
The clear connection to Father’s Day was reflected in gift card sales which rose 53 times compared to the equivalent period in 2017.