2025 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Would you vote for a chicken wing to be prime minister?

In November 2024, when we asked Canadians, with tongue in cheek, if they would rather vote for a chicken wing than the leader of any major political party, 47% said yes.

They assume most of them didn’t mean literally. But the response to this admittedly silly question reveals the level of disaffection Canadians were feeling with the political process in late 2024.

Of course, the brand’s job wasn’t to fix Canadian politics. At least, not at first.

Instead, this story starts with a more basic problem: how to get more Canadians to try Pizza Pizza’s chicken wings. Like most pizza chains, Pizza Pizza offers chicken wings on its menu. Unlike most pizza chains, Pizza Pizza’s stores have deep fryers, so the wings are actually fried fresh, making them that much tastier.

But if we just ran a TV commercial telling people Pizza Pizza’s wings taste better, who would believe us?

There are a million ads out there talking about taste. They needed to find a different way to encourage people to try the wings for themselves.

Possibly saving democracy would just be a bonus.

Canadians had a lot more on their mind than what chicken wings to order for dinner. Political polarization was rising, and Canadians were worried. A brutal and divisive election was playing out south of the border, and signs of discord were spreading across this country, too. Research has found that Canadians worry more about political polarization than the economy or even climate change.

Rather than making the campaign solely about taste, they turned their wings into a cultural moment people wanted to participate in.

As the brand that believes “Everyone Deserves Pizza” — and wings, too — they saw a way to help. A beautiful, inspiring, ridiculously silly way to unite people. What if they put right chicken wings and left chicken wings together … in the same box? Thus was born Bipartisan Wings: 20 wings, left and right, for just $24.

“Pizza Pizza’s Bipartisan Wings”: A taste of harmony in divided times.

They created two American-style attack ads, one for left wings and one for right wings, and ran them in
equal rotation.

Both began with scary voices making serious allegations against the other side; left wings accused right wings of wanting to repeal anti-double-dipping laws, while right wings accused left wings of pushing radical flavours.

They released the tension by cutting the negative ads short with a message of hope: left wings and right wings together. A taste of harmony in divided times.

With a tight budget, the agency ran this advertising in places where they knew people would be following the U.S. election closely and might need a laugh and some savoury wings: news channel CP24, CBC.ca, and on social media. For additional reach, they supplemented these buys with digital OOH in their key
Toronto market.

Although Pizza Pizza is Canada’s largest homegrown pizza brand, the Canadian market is still dominated by American multinationals like Domino’s and Pizza Hut. These competitors benefit from the resources of a global brand; Pizza Pizza’s budgets, on the other hand, are merely Canada-sized.

The total budget was approximately $77,000 for production and $695,000 USD for paid media — a total spend of less than $130,000 for each week this national campaign was in-market.

Sometimes the role of strategy is to see fresh possibilities in familiar places … even if that means the anatomy of a chicken.

The strategy discipline not only defined the business problem to be solved and the cultural context to solve it in, but also stayed heavily involved throughout development to ensure that the campaign spoke to the zeitgeist. Then the agency ran creative testing to make sure we got the tone right. (It turned out the sentiment was overwhelmingly positive.)

It was important to define the cultural context around partisanship on both sides of the border.

With emotions running high, it was crucial to strike the right tone.

It turned out that “Bipartisan Wings” were just the relief many Canadians needed from their frantic doomscrolling. The campaign did more than stop thumbs; it got a lot of sauce on them, too.

There was an immediate and sustained lift in wings category sales. By week 5 of the campaign, wing sales rose 40% compared to the average of the four weeks before the campaign. For three months post-campaign, the category stayed up 25% year-over-year. There was also an increased chicken wings trial intention.

In campaign testing, 42% of people exposed to the advertising said the ad made them want to try Pizza Pizza’s chicken wings.

There was a high return on advertising spend in attributable channels. The Meta conversion campaign returned more than $32 of sales for every $1 spent, beating the benchmark by 67%.

On Instagram, the most-viewed video reached 1.2 million organic impressions, with 99.2% of them coming from non-followers. Total organic watch time was over 897 hours. This was the first time Pizza Pizza had ever broken one million organic views.

Credits

Agency: Zulu Alpha Kilo
Chief Creative Officer: Brian Murray, Jenny Glover
Creative Director/Art Director: Michael Siegers
Creative Director/Writer: Jonah Flynn
Art Director: Tanios Nims
Copywriter: Mariia Kul
Chief Design Officer: Stephanie Yung
Senior Designer: Megan McGhee
Chief Strategy Officer: Heather Segal
Group Strategy Director: Cameron Fleming
Account Team: Tara Collins, Alyssa Guttman, Alex Berube
Director of Integrated Production: Ola Stodulska
Producer: Maddie Estabrooks
Client: Pizza Pizza
Clients: Adrian Fuoco, Amber Winters, Adam Williamson, Ivy Yu, Raymond Luk
Media Agency: Media Experts
Media Team: Sarah Crouch, Lera Pogorielova, Farial Nazim, Lily Lazzara, Blake Goldring, Yolanda Fu
PR Agency: spPR
Post-Production Company: Zulubot
Executive Producer: Sarah Dayus
Post Producer: Gina Simone
Editor + Colourist: Alain Elliot, Can Yuskel
Audio: Creighton Doane
French Adaptation: The French Shop
The French Shop Team: Jessica Dubois Lefort, Gabrielle Papineau, Béatrice Rea, Valérie Forget