Pizza Hut UK, Ireland and France has appointed Jana Ulaite as its new Chief Marketing Officer.

Ulaite has over 15 years of experience in the marketing industry, holding senior positions at TikTok, Apple and Electronic Arts.

Subscribe to Mobile Marketing Magazine

Click here to get the latest marketing news free in your inbox every Thursday

Most recently, she held the position of Vice President of Marketing at tech company Tempest.

In her new position, she will pivotal role in identifying creative ways to deliver brand activity for the restaurant chain.

Commenting on her appointment, Ulaite said: “I’m delighted to be joining Pizza Hut UK & Europe’s leadership team. As one of the world’s largest restaurant and takeaway franchisers, it is truly an iconic brand.

“My role will focus on transforming Pizza Hut into a younger, more culturally relevant, and digital-first brand. Not to mention delivering everyday value and experience for our customers – I can’t wait to drive this forward in 2024.”

The post Ex-Apple and TikTok exec named Pizza Hut UK CMO appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

This campaign also saw Pizza Hut use its ‘now that’s delivery’ brand story globally for first time, after seeing how successful the message was in the UK alongside the restaurant chain’s ambassador character, Parker.

“One of our largest businesses is in the UK, and we have been working with them over the last two years to better develop our brand story, which is ‘now that’s delivering’, and better helping our customers understand that ‘now that’s delivering’ goes beyond the functional aspect of delivering. We’re delivering iconic pizzas. We’re delivering blockbuster moments in culture,” says Courtney Vogel, Global Head of Brand and Digital Marketing at Pizza Hut International.

“We realised we’re at a pivotal time in the brand that made sense for ‘now that’s delivering’ to become our true global brand story, especially given the shift in general consumer habits to the digital, online delivery space.”

The global campaign was fronted by Parker, a familiar character to people in the UK who delivers the brand’s message with humour and fun. He, Parker J Patterson, has been the face of Pizza Hut’s campaigns since 2019.

Vogel describes Parker’s ambassador-type character as being “edgy, clever, and funny, but not necessarily really goofy”.

“We felt this ambassador character could help us ensure that we are a true playful challenger and really bring that ‘now that’s delivering’ story to life for us,” she adds. “Ever since the UK team introduced that character, that ambassador has played a big role in the brand on a global scale. And we think it will continue to play a big role for us for many years to come.”

In order to bring ‘now that’s delivering’ and Parker’s ambassador-type character to the rest of the world, Pizza Hut International turned to Iris Worldwide, an international creative innovation network headquartered in London, England.

Iris first began working with Pizza Hut UK in 2018, helping the UK arm of the restaurant chain to reposition and redefine its brand. This partnership led to the development of ‘now that’s delivering’ and Parker’s character.

Pizza Hut’s global brand identified the success that Iris had with its UK division and enlisted the help of the agency to extend ‘now that’s delivering’ to the rest of the world for the 40^th anniversary of Pan campaign, which delivered the message that Pan pizzas are more satisfying than anything else.

“Iris understands our brand DNA now. They’re an extension of our team,” says Vogel. “We feel really confident working with them on all things Parker and all things Pizza Hut International, so we’ll continue that partnership going forward.

“We knew when that idea came about that [Pan pizza is more satisfying than anything else], it was something we could easily scale and a Pizza Hut consumer in India could understand as easily as a Pizza Hut consumer in Canada.”

Beyond Pizza Hut’s digital-first 40^th anniversary campaign, which also featured a TikTok challenge to engage Millennial and Gen Z consumers, the brand has had to ensure that its shifted toward focusing on digital right across its business – something many businesses have had to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A big part of Pizza Hut’s digital shift, beyond its global marketing campaigns, has been about improving the experience of its customers.

“One of the things that we’ve focused on it that area is making it easy for our consumers to get a hot pizza anywhere, any time,” says Vogel. “Many consumers in some our markets are more used to a dine-in Pizza Hut experience but we had to make kerbside takeaway or contactless delivery key components of our user experience.

“The first thing we did was make sure that our eCommerce platforms were setup to do contactless delivery – and that consumers had the choice for contactless delivery – and then made sure that we’re building the appropriate technology to make kerbside takeaway as easy as possible for the consumer too,” she continues

“So, it wasn’t just in the brand messaging, it was really in the customer experience and all the steps to make your purchase and order as seamless as possible.”

Pizza Hut says it will continue to build on its digital presence and look to continue engaging different audiences on new platforms, such as eSports and TikTok, while making sure that the brand is “front and centre” to the customer on traditional media.

A key aspect of those future digital ambitions is delivering the best possible app for consumers to keep them coming back for more.

“As you come onto our website or app, we know that there’s a lot of value in making sure that we know who you are, and then we can offer you the best recommendations based on what you’ve purchased in the past. So, we want to make things like that very simple for the consumer,” says Vogel.

Away from the digital space, Pizza Hut is going to focusing a lot of its efforts into sustainability, equity, and inclusion in 2021.

A highlight of these plans has been its recent partnership with Beyond Meat in the UK and the US to ensure that plant-based proteins make up part of the restaurant’s menu.

“We’re offering the consumer choice, whether you are a meat eater, a flexitarian, or a vegetarian. So, I would say that one of our huge initiatives is in that plant-based space and expanding our partnership with Beyond across many markets in the world,” concludes Vogel.

The post Were delivering iconic pizzas and blockbuster moments: Pizza Hut talks digital appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Through the Qkr app, customers can order, pay, and split bills from their phone without the need to queue or wait for a server to reach them – which, according to Mastercard, saves people 12 minutes on average.

“Rolling out Qkr is a fantastic opportunity for us to continue the innovation journey we are on as a brand,” said Keith Frimley, IT director at Pizza Hut Restaurants. “Over the last six years we have invested over £60m in transforming our restaurants and menu, and this allows us to continue to improve the service and experience we offer our guests as well as embracing technology, which has become so central to modern culture.”

The Yum! Brands-owned restaurant chain joins Wagamama, Ask Italian, Young’s Pubs, Zizzi, Byron, Bird, and New World Trading in offering Qkr as a way to pay.

Barclaycard is going to trial a similar payment method next month with its ‘Dine & Dash’ solution that will enable people to simply walk out once they have finished eating.

The post Pizza Hut brings mobile payments to its restaurants through Mastercards Qkr appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The e-Palette Concept Vehicle, unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), has been designed by Toyota to ‘meet the demands of future multi-mode transportation and business applications’. Leveraging Toyota’s Mobility Services Platform (MSPF), the vehicle is electric and fully automated.

“The automobile industry is clearly amidst its most dramatic period of change as technologies like electrification, connected and automated driving are making significant progress,” said Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor Corporation president. “Toyota remains committed to making ever better cars. Just as important, we are developing mobility solutions to help everyone enjoy their lives, and we are doing our part to create an ever-better society for the next 100 years and beyond. This announcement marks a major step forward in our evolution towards sustainable mobility, demonstrating our continued expansion beyond traditional cars and trucks to the creation of new values including services for customers.”

Toyota plans on testing the concept vehicle in regions around the world in early 2020, with the hopes of contributing to the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo that year. Toyota’s partners will be able to leverage the concept in coordination with all of the MSPF services, or incorporate the vehicle into their own tech development program.

So, we can prepare ourselves for self-driving pizza deliveries, Amazon deliveries, and Uber rides in a pod-like, futuristic-looking AI vehicle.

The post Pizza Hut, Amazon team with Toyota on self-driving delivery future appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

With that in mind, our Peoples Choice categories let the mobile marketing industry vote for a winner from our shortlist of deserving nominees. Voting has already begun, but this week, well be shining a spotlight on each of the different Peoples Choice categories to give you more information before you make your decision.

Once youre ready to vote, head to our survey to pick your winners before midnight UK time on Friday 29 September. The Peoples Choice winners will be announced alongside the rest of our Awards at our lavish ceremony on Thursday 16 November. You can book your place at this annual highlight here.

Brand of the Year

Amazon – Few can deny the impact that Amazon has had on the digital landscape this year. With the retail giant bringing in $91.4bn (£69bn) in revenues from its core retail business alone in 2016, it continued to go from strength to strength in 2017. The Amazon Echo and its Alexa virtual assistant proved the brand to beat in this exciting new space, while its purchase of Whole Foods made even the largest traditional retailers worry about the disruptive power it could bring to the grocery sector. Add in its growing Web Services business and you have a true digital titan.

Disney – The House That Walt Built has always been a leader when it comes to technology, and this year proved to be no exception, as Disney continued to embrace mobile in all its forms. From partnerships with platforms like Snapchat, Uber and Google Home to innovative campaigns that make use of interactive video and virtual reality, Disney has led the way when it comes to a mobile-first approach to marketing, and with plans to launch its own streaming services in the new year that will compete with rivals like Netflix and Amazon, it’s just beginning to flex its muscles.

Monzo – Since its launch in 2015, Monzo has been the poster child for the new wave of fintech disruption, challenging old assumptions about what a bank has to be. This year, the mobile-first platform officially became a fully authorised digital bank, opening the window to a much wider range of financial products, and celebrated reaching both 100,000 and 200,000 customers within the space of just three and a half months, demonstrating an astonishing speed of growth and a huge demand for its app-focused money management.

N26 – Founded in 2013, N26 was one of the pioneers of the mobile banking movement, and has spread across Europe at astonishing speed, with a presence in 17 countries now and over 500,000 customers. In 2017 alone, it added around 1,500 new accounts every day, while increasing total card transactions by 176 per cent year on year. The firm also launched a wide range of new products this year, including business accounts, savings and even insurance, becoming a true mobile hub for financial services with over $55m under its management.

Pizza Hut – Mobile and convenience have always gone hand-in-hand, so it’s no surprise that a brand like Pizza Hut has leapt into the mobile world from the beginning, constantly working to improve its app and mobile web channels while also producing innovative marketing that seamlessly integrates the latest tech. This year, the firm has collaborated with Amazon to deliver flexible ordering via the Alexa digital assistant, launched a new pizza tracker that provides customers with text alerts, and even debuted a line of promotional connected shoes that could order pizza at the touch of a button.

Sony – As a global technology brand, it’s only natural that Sony’s marketing would incorporate the latest cutting-edge developments. As well as facilitating the rise of VR this year with over 1m Playstation VR headsets sold, the brand launched creative digital campaigns featuring virtual reality, AR, vertical video and even a digital treasure hunt that drove people to real world locations in search of mobile rewards. Add in growing investment in its ‘mixed reality’ Hololens device which is being targeted at business users, and Sony continues to innovate and excel.

Dont forget to cast your vote in all our Peoples Choice categories here before midnight UK time on Friday 29 September, and good luck to all our nominees.

The post Peoples Choice Spotlight: Brand of the Year appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Earlier this month

Starting 3 April – the day when the NCAA College Basketball Tournament comes to an end – fans will be able to join Pizza Hut’s All-American, Jason Zone Fisher, and take part in the Pizza Hut Pie Tops Hunt to find the hidden shoes in the location of the Final Four weekend, the University of Phoenix Stadium.

Yesterday, Fisher gave fans the chance to win a pair of Pie Tops on Instagram and Twitter to celebrate the Final Four match-ups.  

“We had a feeling that people would get excited about getting their pizza at a press of a button, and we were blown away by the response the Pie Tops created,” said David Daniels, VP of media & advertising at Pizza Hut. “Final Four weekend is the perfect time to give fans a chance to take their digital ordering experience to the next level – whether theyre watching the games at home or are lucky enough to be there in-person.”

The post Pizza Hut is taking fans on a 360-degree hunt for its pizza ordering shoes appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The basketball shoes, dubbed the ‘Pizza Hut Pie Tops’, are equipped with Bluetooth communication via a smart button inside the shoe’s tongue. Through this button, the user is connected to the Pie Tops app on their phone and can submit an order.

The shoes are part of Pizza Hut’s partnership with the NCAA, and the upcoming March Madness tournament, and are aimed at showing that ordering pizza is ‘as easy as pie’.

“Its always important that we make it easy for fans to order the Pizza Hut pizza they love without missing a moment of the March Madness action,” said David Daniels, VP for media & advertising at Pizza Hut. “We know pizza is a fan favourite during the NCAA College Basketball Tournament, and our special-edition Pie Tops are a culturally-timed creative expression of our commitment to providing the easiest pizza ordering and delivery experience possible.”

The post Pizza Hut shoes take easy ordering to the next level appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Twitter has introduced chatbots to help brands to communicate with customers on its platform.

They take the form of two new features called welcome messages and quick replies. Welcome messages enable businesses to set up welcome messages to automatically send to people who enter a Direct Message conversation with them, before the person has sent them the first message.

Businesses can create multiple welcome messages and deep link directly to a specific greeting from Tweets, websites, or apps. In a blog post, Twitter’s Ian Cairns said that welcome messages “help businesses demonstrate their commitment to service and help people learn what options exist to engage with a business in Direct Messages.”

Quick replies enables businesses to prompt people with the best ways to reply to a Direct Message, whether by choosing from a list of options or guiding users to enter specific text values.

“When quick replies and welcome messages are used together, businesses can reduce wait times and educate people on the best ways to interact with them,” said Cairns. “For example, they can enable faster resolutions by helping customers more easily provide information to solve problems before an agent sees the first message, or they can simplify automated services and transactional flows that were difficult in the past.”

Pizza Hut, Tesco, Airbnb and Evernote are among the first companies to start using the bot services.
“The new Pizza Hut social ordering platform is another example of making it easy for our customer to order their favorites from Pizza Hut,” said Baron Concors, global chief digital officer at Pizza Hut. “We are constantly pursuing ways to simplify our ordering experience. This platform allows our consumers to quickly order or get information within Twitter where they are already spending a great deal of their time.”

Businesses that provides support in Direct Messages can set a default welcome message in the support settings page of the Twitter Dashboard to greet people when they start a conversation.

The post Twitter Launches Customer Service Chatbots appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

In that spirit, our Innovation Lab feature takes a step beyond the world of apps, ads and handsets with slightly bigger screens, in order to share some of the tech worlds innovative ideas. They might be interesting, disruptive or just outright strange, but these are the stories that have caught our eye over the past week.

Pizza Hut Makes Fast Food Funky with Turntable Boxes

Up until this week, the closest association between pizza and music was probably Vanilla Ices song for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Secret of the Ooze. Thats all set to change though, with an innovative new promotion from Pizza Hut that transforms takeaway boxes into turntables.

Teaming up with printable electronics firm Novalia, Pizza Hut has created a limited edition pizza box that can be unfolded to function as a turntable for digital music when connected via Bluetooth.

The turntables, which function via conductive ink, are actually fairly advanced, with two scratchable decks and controls for playback, pitch, volume and crossfading included on the box. The box requires the connected phone or computer to have DJ software or apps installed, but does come with batteries included to power the turntable feature.

The boxes will only be available from a few select locations in the UK, with further details on how consumers can get hold of one of the special packs set to be shared via Pizza Huts social media.

Pink Paint Provides NASA with Aeronautic Insights
NASAs aircraft are turning pretty in pink as researchers at the organisations aerospace labs across the country turn to bright pink pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) to make advances in aeronautical design.

The specialised paint provides engineers with visual information on how aircraft components are interacting with air pressure and flow, helping them work on new designs that could cut fuel use in half, as well as reducing noise and pollution.

“PSP is great because as long as you can apply paint to the area you want to test, illuminate it with a lamp, and view it with a camera, you can gather data you might not otherwise be able to get,” said Nettie Roozeboom, an aerospace engineer with NASAs Ames Research Centre in California.

Molecules within the paint called luminophores are activated by blue LED lights, with lower pressure areas shining more brightly. This difference in how the paint fluoresces can be analysed and used to better understand how new aircraft designs might perform, as well as improving computer modelling tools also used by NASA.

Object Frame Creates Illusion of Slow Motion Time Bubble

Artist and scientist Jeff Lieberman previously hosted a show called Time Warp that focused on moments captured using extreme slow motion videography. Now, hes created a picture frame that, incredibly, creates the illusion of slow motion movement in real objects.

The Slow Dance frame uses a combination of high speed strobe lighting and vibration to create the illusion. Because the light blinks at 80 times a second, your eyes and mind process it as continuous, but it creates the visual illusion of objects moving in slow motion or jumping discretely to new positions instantaneously.

“One of the primary things I hope people get from interacting with this piece is a moment of pure silence, where theyre so overtaken by the pure sensory experience of seeing something that breaks all of their rules of reality, that their mind just stops and theyre like a newborn, taking the world in as it is without any analysis,” said Lieberman.

Having Trouble Catching Pokémon? This Phone Case Will Help
Israeli firm Innotop is the latest company to cash in on the Pokémon Go phenomenon, by manufacturing phone cases that promise to make it easier to catch the digital creatures in the popular app. Similar bespoke designs have already been seen online, but Innotop is the first to mass produce a case purely for Pokémon Go purposes.

The Aimer Case for Pokémon Go will be available online and at various sales points around the world, with retailers in the US, UK and Israel all reportedly interested in stocking the device. Initially the design will work with iPhone 6 and 6S devices, with plans for other smartphone models in the pipeline.

The minimalist design has two modes. The primary Aimer mode guides users fingers to help them catch Pokémon with greater ease, reducing both user frustration and the number of Pokéballs used in each attempt. The Carry mode snaps to the back of phones, enabling users to carry the smartphone on their belt or trousers and continue tracking their steps while also freeing up their hands.

Amadas Smart Lock Eliminates Keys Altogether

Smart locks have been getting more and more advanced over the past few years, and now the Amadas design, which is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, is aiming to eliminate keys altogether.

The stainless steel design is easily installed and features multiple ways to enter. It can be programmed to recognise your smartphone and automatically unlock at your approach, or you can enter a PIN, either on your mobile or directly on the lock itself. In addition, you can unlock it remotely to let guests enter, while also keeping track of every entrance and exit via the accompanying app.

Perhaps most impressive is the back-up for the battery-operated system. While the door should last for a full year on two AA batteries, should it run out while youre out, you simply have to shine a light on the integrated solar panel, and you can recharge the lock in under 20 seconds, and enter as normal.

Got a piece of work you want to show off to the world? Today is your last chance to enter the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. Get the full details here – and contact awards@mobilemarketingmagazine.com with any questions.

The post Innovation Lab: Musical Pizza, Pink Pressure and Slow Motion Frames appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Beginning at the end of 2016, the pilot will use the robot for taking customers orders and take payment, powered by MasterCards MasterPass platform. Customers will be able to pair their MasterPass account with Peppers technology by selecting an option within the wallet app or scanning a QR code on the robots attached tablet.

Pepper will also provide personalised recommendations and offers, additional information on products, and assistance with the checkout process. You can watch a demo video showing the robot in action below.

“Core to our digital transformation journey is the ability to make it easier for customers to engage, connect and transact with Pizza Hut,” said Pizza Hut Asia MD Vipul Chawla. “With an order and payment-enabled Pepper, customers can now come to expect personalised ordering at our stores, reduce wait time for carry-out, and have a fun, frictionless user experience.”

This is the first commercial application of Pepper, but MasterCard says it shows the potential for other opportunities across retail, travel and finance brands.

The post Pizza Hut Asia Hires Softbanks Pepper Robot for Customer Service appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.