Inside the Pitch: Why Papa Johns Named The Martin Agency Its Creative Agency of Record

Earlier this year, the brand hired Mark Shambura, the former CMO of MOD Pizza, to lead the brand as CMO. He’s focused on capitalizing on the brand’s premium positioning in the category, and do less talking at consumers and more connecting with them, which is where The Martin Agency stood out to him and Jaclyn Ruelle, Papa Johns’ head of brand. The brand also hired Dentsu’s Carat to handle its media buying.

Camp + King and Havas formerly held the creative and media accounts, respectively. In the final round of the account review, IPG’s The Martin Agency competed against two Stagwell shops, 72andSunny and Anomaly, and Omnicom’s TBWA\Chiat\Day for the account. Pile and Company conducted the review for the brand, which spent an estimated $255 million on measured media in 2023, according to COMvergence.

“The brand is focused on balancing current customers with the next generation of Papa Johns customers and doing so by going beyond the typical video spot and diving deeper into subcultures,” Shambura told Adweek. “It’s about creativity and ideas, [The Martin Agency] showed up time and time again with the power of platforms.”

Breaking out of a ‘sea of sameness’

In a category driven by limited-time offers and value, Shambura’s goal in 2024 is connect deeper with culture to be more top of mind for consumers. He doesn’t view brand and performance marketing as a pendulum swinging back and forth for a brand, but as two concentric circles that must remain aligned.

That goal is where The Martin Agency and Carat stood out as being the right pair for the brand due to Martin’s creative chops and Carat’s understanding of data and tracking personal profiles through its Merkury product.

To do this, the brand wants to be more than its longtime slogan “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.”

“We want to be the pizza brand that really celebrates that culture of pizza, not just focusing on the food, but the entire premium experience,” Shambura said, adding, “for us, it’s imbuing a lot more emotion into our brand and into the category than we’ve seen to date.”

Ultimately they want to cut through the “sea of sameness” in the category, said Ruelle, who spent the previous 12 years agency side with MullenLowe and The Martin Agency. “How can we break out of that kind of monotony that you see the category fall into where we’re all kind of shouting price points, and it becomes this coupon wallpaper, in a sense.”

According to a report from QSR Magazine, Papa Johns ranked third among the national pizza chains in 2022 for total sales, barely edging Little Caesars for that position and trailing only Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

“People are obsessed with pizza, but they don’t really care that much about where they order it from,” Jerry Hoak, ecd for The Martin Agency, told Adweek. “There’s a ton of promiscuity, so we just need to make them relevant and get people thinking about Papa Johns, when they’re thinking pizza.”

Ruelle and Jeff Hagen, the vp of media and field activation, were “joined at the hip” during the review as Hagen put it in order to get Carat and Martin aligned for when they officially start working together on Jan. 1, 2024.

“The whole thing was you can’t just have short-term and long-term [marketing],” Hagen said. The review focused on combining both of them and getting the right balance. “And it’s really smart, driven off of consumer insights, but it’s also core to who Papa Johns is as a company.”

Inside the review

With a creative and media operating simultaneously, Shambura recognized the organization couldn’t manage both reviews, and he brought on Pile & Company, who he previously had a relationship with. The review ran four months, which they admitted was long, but the three stakeholders, Shambura, Ruelle and Hagen said they made themselves overly available.

“It was very important to Jaclyn, Jeff and myself that we showed up as really good, thoughtful partners to all of these agencies because the amount of time and effort they were putting into it,” Shambura said, adding, “It’s important to us to make sure that this went quickly but smoothly and in one that wasn’t going to destroy the agency’s time and value.”

All four finalists received multiple meetings in Atlanta in the final round and traveled to the agencies to get to know them. Papa Johns’ top marketers also didn’t go dark for weeks at a time, and made themselves accessible through check-ins and email, even with a consultant on-board running the pitch. Multiple agencies involved in the pitch told Adweek that this pitch was run well and noted how hands-on the brand’s top marketers were.

Following the review, Shambura said expect the first work from The Martin Agency to appear in spring 2024, and Hagen confirmed that Carat is already in-market buying media for the brand. As for Super Bowl plans, Shambura said those are still to be determined.