Part 2: Designing the Papa John's Collection Program

This multipart project consisted of on-air advertising, web messaging and, most importantly, internal communication for the Papa Johns Pizza team. We were confident in our ability to get the web portion of the campaign dialed in and get recycling collection boxes to the stores for customers who picked up. Management at Papa Johns was excited about the new promotion as well, but their internal communication would be intense. Papa John’s marketing team had to communicate to 81 store managers and also wanted to provide incentives for both stores and employees.

Looking at the radio spots, we needed to reach the 313K KYGO weekly audience. We calculated the 41 Colorado stores who deliver thousands of pizzas per week in coordination with the $17K in advertising budget dollars for the 40-day length of the campaign. We put our heads together and decided on the evening drive time. There would be a 3:30 to 7:00 p.m. 30-second drive time spot and the 60-second live version that would hit the drive time audience between the hours of 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. by the drive time DJ Catfish. We really liked the fact that a personality would carry our message. Sometimes the best you can do is make these decisions based on personal habits and advice from the experts in radio. I have a tendency to change the channel when I hear a commercial but when my DJ keeps talking into his segment I generally listen. According to our calculations, if 2% of the 313K listeners who heard our message, believe in our mission, and donated their phone over the life of the campaign, we would break even and at worst get some good exposure out of this campaign. If we got over 2% then it would be high fives all the way around.

We placed the Papa Johns banner on the Cellular Recycler home page linking to the campaign details page. If a participating customer would want to learn more on where the donations would be going or what would happen to their old phone they wouldn’t have to dig too deep to get their desired information.

We knew when writing this 30-second spot, there is little time and many words needed to get a point across. Our order of priority was: free breadsticks, give without giving during the holiday season, Papa Johns Pizza, supporting our troops, and THEN Cellular Recycler. Our name says what we do but the last thing on our mind was brand recognition because the focus was phone collection.

Read Part 1 of this series.

Part 1: Hatching an Idea for the First Cell Phone Recycling Pick-Up Campaign

For the next few weeks, I will be blogging about a new Cellular Recycler campaign with Papa John's Pizza. Here is my first post about the idea behind the campaign.



Shortly after the 2007 NFL football season, I was listening to Sports Radio 950 the fan (now FM 104.3). Now, I have never done radio advertising and we definitely haven’t done it for Cellular Recycler. But, as I was listening, I thought it might be a good venue for letting soccer moms and football dads out there know that there was a new fundraising option instead of the every day popcorn and Christmas wreath sales that both kids and parents (and their parents' officemates)have to endure. The station was nice enough to invite us down to talk about a possible partnership. Admittedly, I didn’t know exactly what we were after, except that I felt it was time to take cell phone recycling to the people through a more widespread public campaign.

Although it was fun to see Scott Hastings and Alfred Williams doing their radio show, it wasn’t a great fit initially. We found out pretty quickly that 90% of their listeners were male. (You might say ‘duh’, but remember that at the time we were new to the whole radio advertising thing.) From our experience of building ground floor collection campaigns with companies like the American Cancer Society, we knew that we really needed to communicate with women in order to have a successful campaign. (Why? Honestly, I don’t know, but I plan to explore this in a future post.) Bottom line – sports radio was definitely not the right medium to test this “widespread public campaign” concept. Nonetheless, we left the meeting with confidence because at least we tried, failed, and learned from the experience.

It turned out that all wasn’t lost because Lincoln Financial Media, owner of 950 The Fan, also owns the country pop station KYGO, and it has a very solid and faithful base of female listeners. Our account rep had taken the cell phone recycling and fundraising concept to one of the station’s clients, Papa John’s Pizza. All of a sudden, we had a huge company like Papa John’s Pizza that was looking for an environmental edge and loved being the first with a message like this to its customers.

In the past, our team has fought and fought to get out cell phone recycling kits to business and non-profits, place recycling bins in retail stores, and train employees at wireless carriers about recycling. But this idea was truly different. This would be an opportunity for us to partner with a great company, promote the program to the general public, offer people a way to recycle their electronics, and raise money for a great cause. Papa Johns Pizza was even willing to offer its customers free breadsticks for their donation and use the program to fundraise for one of Papa John’s charitable partners, the USO.



Given what’s going on with the economy and how likely charitable organizations are to suffer, everything just seemed to click. Within three hours, our teams had hashed out a plan and set the wheels in motion for the first pick-up campaign for cell phone recycling. And at Cellular Recycler, we finally had a chance to take a campaign directly to the people.



Stay tuned – next I’ll talk about how we designed the collection program.

Papa Johns partners with Cellular Recycler

Donate a Cell Phone, Enjoy Free Breadsticks, Support our US Troops and Protect the Environment

Colorado Papa John's pizza locations will be collecting old, unused, broken and still working cell phones this holiday season. Every customer who drops off or gives a cell phone to a Papa John’s delivery driver will be given a gift certificate for a FREE order of breadsticks with their next order. All cell phones will broken down for parts or refurbished by local Boulder company Cellular Recycler. All efforts are taken to protect the environment and prevent unused cell phones from polluting our landfills. Proceeds from the collection of these cell phones will be donated, on behalf of Papa John's Pizza of Colorado, to the Rocky Mountain USO to benefit our US Troops.

WHEN: NOV 5 thru DEC 15
WHO: Papa John’s Delivery Drivers asking for and picking up old, unused, broken and still working cell phones to benefit our US Troops and our precious environment.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit http://www.cellularrecycler.com/papajohns