Some Might Say It's Cheesley Crisptastic

Challenge: Freshen up a 60-year-old pizza institution without losing its soul.
Solution: Stop trying to explain the pizza and start celebrating it, with style.
Results: Campaign data is still coming, but the work is live below.

Imo’s // Brand Campaign

Challenge

Imo’s Pizza has been a St. Louis birthright for over 60 years. Ultra-thin crust. Square cut. Provel cheese. The kind of thing locals defend with genuine passion and newcomers approach with genuine side-eye.

That polarizing quality is Imo’s greatest asset and its central strategic tension. With its legacy audience aging and store traffic softening, Imo’s needed to drive trial among busy parents and younger adults with far too many options. Expansion markets presented real opportunity and a real risk: how do you scale into new territory without sanding down the very edges that make Imo’s worth knowing and loving?

Solution

Make a flavor profile that’s impossible to describe completely impossible to overlook.

Research pointed the way. 41% of diners cite Imo’s unique taste and Provel as its single most appealing asset. 29% point to quality ingredients. The product’s quirks are also its greatest qualities.

Rather than normalizing the pizza for new audiences, we doubled down on its strangeness under one main idea: Imo’s satisfies a craving you can’t fully explain.

The creative expression was Squarely Crisperific: a whimsical, color-drenched, fashionably weird world built to redefine what QSR food marketing could look like. We invented a proprietary brand vocabulary to capture what no existing words could: Provelicious. Tangthinerous. Slimsavory. Terms that sound made-up because nothing in the dictionary quite fits.

The production built a hyper-pigmented universe, complete with a custom paper-cutout St. Louis skyline, turf-covered sets, color-blocked studio talent in pizza parlor-inspired patterns, and interactive pop-through holes where hands deliver fresh squares out of nowhere. Slow-motion food closeups of bubbling Provel and sizzling edge-to-edge toppings did the rest.
Campaign assets were built for flexibility and visibility across CTV, digital video, paid social, programmatic display and local OOH, designed to drive immediate craving in both regional strongholds and new expansion markets.