Domino’s, the quick-service restaurant chain, found success with a campaign that rewarded customers for sharing images of its own pizzas, as well as products made by its rivals, and even homemade alternatives.

Christopher Thomas-Moore, vp/global ecommerce and digital marketing at Domino’s, discussed the “Points for Pies” campaign at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2019 Digital and Social Media Conference.

And he reported that this initiative, which launched in early 2019, asked consumers to visit its branded mobile app and upload an image of a pizza in exchange for loyalty points.

The photograph could be of any pizza – be it from Domino’s itself, a competitor’s product, a homemade effort, or a frozen pie. After collecting a certain number of points for engaging in this activity, the user earned a free pizza from Domino’s.

“We provided some questions to better understand the pizza,” said Thomas-Moore. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Domino’s promotes rivals’ products on the path to consumer insight and engagement.)

And, behind the scenes, an artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithm analysed the images uploaded to the app – and was even able to spot a dog toy in the shape of a pizza slice.

The questions Domino’s asked about users’ pizzas helped it achieve two things. “One, they provided us an opportunity to better understand our customers and become more relevant in the communications that we have with them,” said Thomas-Moore.

“But, secondly, it helped us build a stronger model. What does a hot pizza look like? What does a cold pizza look like? What are the different ingredients that you have on that pizza?

“We appended all that data in the actual scans, so we could track that and give it to the machine-learning platform that we were leveraging to build up this technology.”

Alongside generating a billion impressions and significant social conversations, Domino’s campaign was able to test the power of influencer marketing for its brand, and yielded many other benefits. “It really was a huge win for the brand,” Thomas-Moore said.

Sourced from WARC