Objective: Leverage the popular Twitter trending topic #Bendgate—which was elevated with the launch of the new iPhone 6 to bring Papa John's pizza into the social conversation in an on-brand, ownable way with a 'Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.' Lens for social content.
Strategy: Align Papa John's to relevant pop culture moments and convey 'better messaging' as part of our, "Better Ingredients. Better Pizza." campaign story. We did this by creating and rapidly posting content that fans would engage with and likely react to positively by adding in 'better' and 'pizza' to the conversation.
Outcome: The tweet became our most engaged tweet ever for Papa John's, until that point in time, with minimal media support. As a result, we saw positive social commentary, and made several 'best of' brand lists that featured what top brands did to jump on to the #Bendgate trend.
The #Bendgate post was extraordinary, because of the rapid pace in which the agency/client concepted, created, and executed the content. Considering Papa John's is known for "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza," the post reinforced ownable brand attributes into the cultural conversation. The line we went with was about Better Pizza not bending (like the new iPhones) but instead folding, thus tying the pop culture chatter to a unique brand attribute.
Ultimately, the success was showcased by the positive fan reactions and Tweets and resulted in abnormally high content share rates.
