Little Caesars was launching the Pepperoni Stuffed Crust pizza — our take on stuffed crust, with pepperoni on the pizza AND in the crust.

But getting people excited was a challenge since stuffed crust pizza wasn’t new. So we chose social media for our platform and leveraged TikTok — getting people to watch and engage with our content.

When the new pizza was released in the spring of 2021, everyone was starting to travel again, go to concerts, and get back to normal life. But, that didn’t mean life’s responsibilities went away.

Maybe there was a way Little Caesars could alleviate that with something fun.

As everyone was emerging from quarantine, we all wanted to stuff our days with everything fun we’d been missing. But, we still had all our pre-pandemic responsibilities.

We decided stuffed doppelgangers were the answer. Life-sized dolls that look exactly like you, stuffed full of nine feet of felt pepperoni and cheese. They can sit in on Zoom calls and do chores all day so that you can stuff your day with fun stuff — like Pepperoni and Cheese Stuffed Crust!

We identified influencers who were a good brand fit and sent them their very own stuffed doppelganger. Keeping these a surprise was key — we wanted reactions to be authentic and outrageous.

We were in the midst of broadening the Little Caesars target audience and attracting younger consumers. In order to move at the speed of culture, we stay plugged into the social conversation via social listening, social trends, and ongoing consumer interviews. With that knowledge, we felt our social community would be eager to participate in this crazy idea with us.

So we decided to go after our expanding TikTok community with our stuffed doppelgangers. Our key message as a brand has been that Little Caesars really cares about consumers. Bringing them stuffed doppelgangers to help with post-pandemic life was just another way of showing this.

We leveraged a mix of high-impact social units, in addition to conversion-driving tactics to garner brand love against our target audience while still maintaining focus on the overarching goal to sell pizzas.

We identified creators will to get weird with us. And then we started stuffing… their doppelgangers that is. Each influencer received their very own stuffed doppelganger to help “smooth over” the transition to post-pandemic life. But keeping these doppelgangers a surprise was key. We wanted influencer reactions to be authentic and outrageous.

Then we “recruited” a superfan on our TikTok channel with a guessing game. And stuff got crazy. Our winning fan, @westheghost got his own doppelganger and had an incredible unboxing. Even though our content was focused on TikTok, once this fan video went viral on the platform, it then spilled over to other platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram.

The campaign was a little risky. It relied on trusting our fans and influencers to get weird with us, but ultimately, it paid off.

- 63 million TikTok views and 82 million+ combined video views

- 3.5 million+ video likes

- 20K new followers on TikTok

And boosting our fan @westheghost paid off, too.

- His followers went from just 2K to 70K

- 8.5 million+ organic video views

- His TikTok video ended up as #2 on Reddit /mildlyinteresting

Other influencers reached out to us, asking if they could collab with us in the future. And we had fans asking us where they could buy the “Let’s Get Stuffed” t-shirt that our creators and doppelgangers were wearing.

In the words of @zamthewriter “All these Little Caesars tiktoks might convince me to try some @littlecaesars for the first time in my life??????”