Little Caesars is making a big ad buy, confirming plans to run a Super Bowl commercial starring “The Office” star Rainn Wilson.
The news shows some shift in thought for the nation’s No. 3 pizza chain.
Little Caesars will run its first in-game Super Bowl spot to promote delivery, which is a new concept for the chain. Little Caesars is hinting that the creative will claim its “America’s Best Value, Delivered” is the "best thing since sliced bread."
Pizza chains typically advertise before kickoff in the hopes of enticing people to pick their brands during one of the busiest days of the year for pizza sales. Even Pizza Hut, the official pizza sponsor of the National Football League since 2018, runs its commercials before the game begins.
“While we’re not sharing the full creative yet, you can bet the ad will feature the humor and playfulness that has long been quintessentially Little Caesars,” Jeff Klein, senior VP of global marketing, said in a statement.
The commercial is set to run during the second pod in the game’s third quarter.
The ad plan from the Hot-n-Ready pizza chain comes after Little Caesars selected McKinney as its agency of record in early November.
Little Caesars began working with Barton F. Graf in 2012 and initiated a creative review last year when that agency said it was going out of business by the end of 2019. Cliff Freeman was the agency that popularized the “Pizza! Pizza!” tagline first used in 1979.
Detroit-based Little Caesars is the No. 3 pizza chain behind Domino’s and Pizza Hut. Little Caesars’ measured media spending rose to $181.2 million in 2018 from $174.3 million in 2017, according to an Ad Age Datacenter analysis of data from Kantar.
Two teasers were released on Wednesday, "Desk" and "Mutiny."
