Imo's Pizza - Square Deals program (2023)
My first assignment at Paradowski Creative was to name the new Imo's Pizza reward program and app experience: an exciting new project for St. Louis' signature, famously square-cut pizza. That was the easy part.
This assignment also included concepting and writing television commercials, radio spots, brand guidelines, usage templates, aesthetic and copy direction, and style guidelines for Imo's first major customer rewards initiative in 60 years.
We knew we wanted to create deeper meaning with this program in a time when Imo’s was expanding regionally and reintroducing themselves to existing and new customers. We also wanted to offer more than just "food freebies," but rather an app that delivers the same inviting, tactile, fulfilling rewards experience customers expect from similar apps, such as Starbucks.
In the year that followed, we were able to fully launch this robust new experience while, amazingly, getting some Organic Earned Media in the process: rather than pitch the press, they reached out to us after watching the spot online.
The Launch Commercial
In concepting this spot, the client didn't want to use actors and scripted character moments as we had in the past. The creative brief expressed desire to showcase/hero the food, while pushing for downloads of the new app.
In my mind, the simplest, clearest, and most clever ideas are the most effective. As such, I was first influenced by a popular and brilliantly effective Super Bowl commercial from 2022: a single bouncing QR code. I thought we could take this to a more exciting place for consumers.
Inspiration struck when I realized Imo’s pizza is square cut, and could be arranged like pizza pixels into a working QR code. But I was only interested in executing the idea if we could build it for real. That’s when we put our heads together to make pizza magic happen.
We insisted on filming the spot with practical effects, something that had never been done before with pizza to our knowledge. That means we actually used around 20-25 hot Imo’s pizzas to create nine sections of a 62 ½ by 62 ½ pizza at their headquarters, and then a 6K, Blackmagic Cinema Camera mounted on a 9-foot jib to capture the entire process. And it actually works: the proof is in the Provel.
Through its award-winning VR and AI client work, Paradowski is always looking for new challenges that bridge the gap between creativity and the latest tech. So, this idea became the perfect assignment to push ourselves yet again with our favorite pizza brand.
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More technical behind the scenes:
- Our food stylist carefully cut over 300 pieces of square-cut pizza for this shoot.
- Shooting the commercial practically, in real-time, meant a complex coordination and choreography of nimble hands, hot pizza, moving cameras, moving squares, and dramatic lighting sweeps in order to bring the entire process together. It was exciting and intense, considering this has never been attempted before.
- Everything in the Square Deals spot was captured in-camera on set, then composited in the final spot. No green screen was used.
- Our pizza grid used 25 pizzas, at 2.5 inches per square…we wanted the visuals to also reflect the Square Deals app experience, which now allows Imo’s fans to collect pieces of pizza to earn free pizza and other rewards.
- In the end, we used about 20 to 25 pizzas to build the QR code over two days of filming. And it involved a lot of gooey, cheesy, delicious math.
This campaign is very much IN PROCESS, and final results will follow. But, so far, we are exceeding expectations for the Square Beyond Compare.
