Canadian QSR chain Pizza Pizza and Brazilian online dog food brand Güd won Best in Show awards at last night’s MMA Smarties Awards 2019 in Los Angeles.
A campaign by Media Experts for Pizza Pizza picked up the North America Best in Show award; one by J.Walter Thompson Brasil for Güd won the equivalent in the new Smarties X global awards, which recognize outstanding innovation resulting in significant business impact for brands, agencies, media companies and technology providers.
Pizza Pizza’s sales had been trending downwards for two years, thanks to flat QSR category growth and third-party delivery services, such as Uber Eats, creating huge disruption. But when it mined search behavior, it discovered a late-night ordering spike that, on further investigation, correlated with search patterns for cannabis.
A promotion was launched with a mobile-heavy search campaign that saw Pizza Pizza bidding on cannabis-related keywords and serving ads that featured stoner puns. The campaign resulted in a 70% sales lift, helping Pizza Pizza hit its highest sales in two years and steal market share from rivals McDonald’s and Domino’s.
Further south, Güd also took to search to help drive brand awareness. It developed a stray-dog adoption campaign that took advantage of people’s spelling mistakes when looking for dog breeds as a way to drive traffic to a rescue center in Brazil.
It bought the most common mis-spelled words and turned them into Google ads for a chance to get a dog for free, with users clicking on the ad being directed to Güd’s own branded website where pets’ personal profiles were housed.
Besides helping raise the number of dogs adopted by 740%, the campaign earned Güd a 40% growth in the number of followers on their social media and more than 85,000 visits to its website.
Sourced from MMA
