As the Pizza Today crew travels the country and interacts with operators at events like International Pizza Expo, there is one trend that shakes the core of traditional advertising. In lieu of radio, television and newspaper spots, many independent operators are gravitating towards innovative solutions that bring pizzerias closer to their patrons and potential customers.

Tom Hirons, president and CEO of Hirons & Company in Indianapolis, says he looks for alternatives to advertising first. “The types of advertising that we are seeing most effective — or communications that are most effective — at stimulating repeat visits are those that have engagement with the customer,” he says.

Crowdsourcing, online social and viral campaigns and guerilla promotions are all the buzz now. “Crowdsourcing is a really interesting strategy for social media, where essentially you pose a problem and ask your customers to vote or weigh in,” Hirons says. He adds that it could be as simple as asking what your pizza special should be.

We talked to four pizzerias that have found creative outlets to target consumers in four different markets: Minneapolis, Minnesota; New Orleans, Louisiana; Dallas, Texas; and Chicago, Illinois. Check out how the pizzerias are redefining marketing:

Anne Kim, owner of Pizzeria Lola in Minneapolis, doesn’t do traditional advertising. Instead, she opts for tactics that build community. Earlier this year, she posed a question on the company’s Facebook page: “Would you dine at Lola’s if we were open for lunch on weekdays? Discuss.” The post elicited dozens of likes and 33 comments. That is crowdsourcing. It brought her customers into the folds of the business.

There is no better in-store advertising at Lola than an entire wall filled with photo strips of happy customers. For $3, patrons hop into a custom-designed photo booth and get two retro three-photo strips with Lola’s information on the back. Customers began leaving behind the duplicate for the wall. “People love it and associate the photo booth with our brand,” Kim says.

The restaurant’s promotional video displayed on its Web site has also caught fire. It features the pizzeria’s namesake Lola, a Weimaraner. Kim found traditional videos of the pizza-making process to be a bit boring. And people always presumed she was Lola. “I wanted a fun video that would be memorable,” she says, adding it showcases the restaurant and shares the K-9 behind the name.

Freebies are another great marketing tool at Lola’s. Kim went with retro matchboxes that are printed with “I love pizza,” in Korean, as well as ones printed with Kim’s toddler passport photo.

Reginelli’s Pizzeria’s nine New Orleans locations also take a different approach. “Advertising is tough,” co-owner Darryl Reginelli says. “We would rather put the budget into churches and schools.” The company provides donations, buys booths at events and sponsors activities.

Guerrilla marketing is also a key component to Reginelli’s strategy. During the last local election, Reginelli’s went into the community where the political parties campaigned and gave out pizza.

Reginelli’s also takes to Facebook to generate votes for New Orlean’s Where Y’at magazine’s Best of the Big Easy. It’s a common crowdsourcing tactic that a lot of restaurants use to get their patrons fired up about their product.

A billboard is the one piece of traditional advertising Reginelli uses. The billboard depicts Reginelli pointing at one of his pizzeria locations. “It’s fun and different,” he says, adding that it draws attention and serves its function to direct traffic to the store.

Il Cane Rosso in Dallas uses its iOS-based reservation system to capture customers’ cell phone numbers. “When they are finished dining, the system will ping them with a text message asking them if they want to ‘opt in’ to our marketing list,” owner Jay Jerrier says, adding that he is careful not to overload them with texts. Cane Rosso only texts new happenings, like operating-hour changes, brunch or seasonal items.

Jerrier demonstrates the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” He rotates the cover art of his Facebook page with mouthwatering shots of his menu items. With the Facebook timeline layout, the cover art is prime advertising space.

Instagram, a photo sharing smart phone app that uploads images to social media sites, is gaining popularity, providing great opportunities for restaurants. Jerrier loves it. “We use Instagram the same way we use Facebook and Twitter — to drive reaction and interaction,” he says. “We want people to comment on our photos and share our posts.”

Cane Rosso has married the three outlets together with great success. “We’ll post a picture and everyone wants to know what it is, like our Honey Badger (mozzarella, hot soppressata and house-made habanero honey),” he says. “It’s not on the menu but it is one of our most popular pizzas — all driven from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.”

Jim Furrh produces creative ads for Piece Brewery and Pizzeria in Chicago.

Instead of placing them in traditional means, the ads are posted to Facebook and Twitter and printed on posters and table tents in the store.

Piece ads are witty and humorous. “We target adults 22 to 35, so we can be a little more contemporary or edgy,” Furrh says. He adds that a Piece ad consists of a trueism or human insight and it only presents one idea.

The quirky ads celebrate any holiday, even ones the staff makes up. For Father’s Day, the pizzeria’s ad read, “Your father loved pizza and beer long before he loved you. Take your dad to Piece for Father’s Day.”

Reaching customers may be as simple as thinking outside of the box. Look for innovation everywhere and harness it to spark your own creativity.

THE STRATEGY

Advertising and marketing can be a costly and time intensive endeavor. Tom Hirons of Hirons & Company in Indianapolis offers strategic planning advice. Before you jump into an advertising tactic, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my objectives? (Is it to stimulate new trial? Is it to stimulate a certain period of time?)
• How am I going to measure this and to determine my return on investment?
• Exactly who is it that I want to target demographically and psychographically?

Denise Greer is associate editor of Pizza Today.

There he sat, as expressionless as an iguana as I explained how an ad I would create for him would sink like a dropped anchor, even with a great headline, plenty of benefits and a no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee. He would be pouring money away with the tap wide open. It was a bit awkward for sure.

I recently sat eyeball to eyeball with a client that tasked me with finding a way to advertise a fish pizza that just hadn’t caught on. It was his “pet” pizza. He loved it. I thought it was okay, and customers had already been given free samples. Yet it just wouldn’t budge.

He figured some fancy ad would surely get this pizza moving up the sales channel and turn it into a signature item.

Let’s get straight on something right now: A deep-rooted, fundamental marketing “fact” is that you will make lots of money by selling people what they already want to buy. That said, you can go broke “on the quick” by plowing your ad budget into promoting fringe items with little interest.

Take, for example, grocery stores. They advertise top-selling items only. Stuff with wide appeal. Things with proven ability to drive traffic. Items that cast the widest net over the marketplace: milk, meats, soft drinks. They don’t promote mousetraps, toilet plungers or liverwurst.

I often see pizzerias advertise a “Large Cheese Pizza” at a low price-point because they’re afraid of scaring prospects away with a higher-priced offer. Now that’s fine if cheese pizzas are one of your top sellers. If they’re not, though, you are advertising something with little demand — and the low-price offer is costing you more than it’s bringing in.

Even though my pizzeria was widely known for “gourmet,” I found it best to advertise the Combo, BBQ chicken pizza, and I’d always throw a veggie pizza in the mix. Why? Because those pizzas made the phones ring off the hook. Now, I certainly listed my entire menu on most ads, but I only used photos and offers for my top sellers.

You’ll instantly improve your advertising results by following this path of least resistance. And that is by advertising what people already want to buy from you.

Here’s three easy ways you can figure out exactly what you should be advertising to drive the most traffic with the least money spent.

• What are your current top three selling pizzas or entrees?

• What has been a crowd favorite for a long time?

• What are the big chains advertising?

Okay, the mere fact that your top-selling pizzas are your “top-selling” pizzas means people want to buy them. Your marketplace has already told you what to advertise. Listen to your customers!

One commonly overlooked aspect of dough management is that of temperature control. Temperature, temperature, temperature — our life in the store revolves around temperatures. The temperature of the cooler and oven, the holding temperature of the food on the lunch buffet, the temperature of the freezer, even the temperature of the room is generally known and regularly monitored, but temperatures as they relate to the dough are seldom, if ever, taken. If you are one of those who do take the temperature of anything that will allow you to stick a thermometer into it, I applaud you. Otherwise, read on.

Dough is made with yeast, and yeast is a living organism (just like us). And just like us, it responds to its environment in a predictable manner. In general, higher temperatures accelerate yeast activity and lower temperatures depress it.
If you use active dry yeast you must rehydrate and activate it before adding it to the mixing bowl. This is done using warm water at 100 to 105F. If the temperature is outside of this range damage can be done to the yeast. This will adversely affect the performance of the dough. The same can be said for instant dry yeast. While not generally rehydrated, in some instances it is necessary to rehydrate it prior to use — such as when the vertical cutter mixer is used and very short mixing times are employed (75 to 120 seconds). With active dry yeast the recommended water temperature for rehydrating the yeast is 95F. It is well recognized that if this water temperature is off by only 5F, measurable damage to the yeast will be sustained. This just can't be good for dough consistency. The best way to guarantee that the water is at the correct temperature for rehydrating the yeast is to use a thermometer to measure the water temperature before adding the yeast to it.

Then there is the finished dough temperature. This sets the stage for the way the dough will perform during our dough management period (and to a great extent it will also influence the way the dough handles during forming and even the way it bakes up). There are a lot of things hinging on the finished dough temperature that are all very important to us, so is it any wonder that this could possibly be the single most important temperature there is to measure?
When we add the ingredients to the mixing bowl each ingredient has its own temperature, then when the dough is mixed, friction is developed between the moving dough and the sided of the mixing bowl. This friction raises the dough temperature during mixing.

The temperature of the room also influences the finished temperature of the dough. To control the temperature of the dough we typically adjust the temperature of the water that is added to the dough. In most cases a finished dough temperature of 80 to 85F is desirable. So the question that now begs to be asked is how do I know what the water temperature needs to be to give me the desired finished dough temperature?
There is a simple formula that can be followed to give you that "magic" number. Here it is: 3 X desired finished dough temperature minus the sum of the flour temperature, room temperature and friction factor. There is a formula for figuring the friction factor too, but space does not permit me to go into those details at this time so we will use the number "30" for our friction factor. Here is a typical working example of the formula: We want our finished dough temperature to be 80F. The room temperature is 75F, the flour temperature is 72F. Our formula at work: 3 X 80 = 240. Next, subtract the sum of 75 + 72 + 30, which is 177. This gives us 63 (240 minus 177). The correct water temperature to add to this dough would be 63F. If you need to make any further adjustments to the water temperature to get the finished dough temperature right where you want it, adjust the water temperature in 5F increments either higher or lower and you will be able to steer the finished dough temperature to where you want it.

The finished dough temperature is so important because it sets the stage for the way the dough will perform during the forming and baking stages. If the dough temperature is too high you may experience problems with either wet doughs due to sweating or blown doughs due to excessive fermentation. If the finished dough temperature is too low the dough may not receive sufficient fermentation within the time allocated and the dough will be difficult to shape (not to mention the problems you can then experience with excessive dough memory or snap-back). If you are making pan style pizzas the dough temperature is doubly important since it can impact the length of time needed for the dough to rise (proof) to a specific height in the pan. An old trick worth mentioning here is to use one of the hot presses to form the dough skins for pan style pizzas.

The heat imparted to the dough piece during the forming operation helps to significantly reduce the time needed for the dough to rise in the pan. In some cases we have been able to eliminate the need for a final proofer (temperature and humidity controlled cabinet) when hot pressing pan style pizzas and instead just place the pans of heated dough onto a vertical pan/tray rack and cover it with a rack cover or bag and get acceptable dough proofing.
As you can see, temperatures are important as it pertains to our doughs. It's a good idea to record the room temperature, flour temperature, and the water temperature for every dough that we make.

This will allow you to, at a glance, determine the room and flour temperatures and see what water temperature was previously used to achieve the target dough temperature. If you watch, record, and maintain your dough temperature you will be well on your way to producing more consistent performing doughs and more consistent, high quality finished pizzas.

• Be ready for an examination at any time. To do this, managers should conduct weekly internal inspections. Follow the protocols that health inspectors use, looking at areas both outside the premises and in.
• Share the results of the inspection with kitchen staff. Those weekly meetings allow the operation to stay on top of any infractions and also keep safety issues top-of-mind with employees. Crucial areas that require vigilance from kitchen staff are food temperature, awareness of food types to avoid cross contamination and hand washing.
• Operators must follow municipal regulations on certification. They should ensure that some, if not all, staff attend food-safety training programs and become certified.

• Managers should never refuse an inspection — no matter how inconvenient the timing. If an inspector has to return with a warrant, the inspection will most likely be a lot more thorough.
• A staff member should accompany the inspector and take notes on areas inspected and violations found. This illustrates camaraderie to the inspector, and allows an on-the-spot fix of smaller infractions.
• Once the inspection is over, the restaurant employee should ask for the results to be shared with the rest of the staff, so improvements can begin immediately.

• Small problems should be fixed during the inspection to illustrate good faith.
• If violations cited need clarifying, staff should respectfully ask the inspector to explain his/her findings.
• If the operator disagrees with the findings, he/she should appeal the decision through the local health department — disagreeing with the inspector on site is not a good idea.

• Food-safety hazards, including contaminants, allergens and foodborne illness.
• Flow-of-food hazards that covers issues such as cross-contamination; time and temperature control; safe receiving; food storage; preparation and serving; and cooling and reheating.
• Sanitation, including personal hygiene and how food handlers can contaminate foods.
• Pest control, including identifying pests and using and storing pesticides.

• Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points is a preventive government protocol. A strict adherence to the principles of HACCP ensures safe food-handling practices. For more information, go to the USDA’s site, http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/haccp.html
• Hazard Analysis. Hazards are identified as biological, such as a microbe; chemical, such as a toxin; or physical, such as ground glass or metal fragments.
• Critical control point identification. Points are markers in a food’s production — from its raw state through processing and shipping to consumption.
• Establishment of critical limits. Preventive measures are set up with critical limits for each control point, such as minimum cooking temperature and time needed to eliminate harmful microbes.
• Monitoring procedures. Critical control points need to be monitored. For instance, protocols need to be set in place for how long and by whom cooking time and temperature is monitored.
• Corrective actions. When monitoring shows that a critical limit has not been met, there should be corrective actions in place to deal with the issue.
• Record Keeping. Establish procedures to ensure that the system is functioning correctly.
• Verification procedures. Document your HACCP system with spot-on record keeping, such as records of hazards and their control methods.

Resources

Use these to make sure your restaurant is covered

Any way you slice it, 105 years is a long time. That’s how long one of America’s favorite foods has been a part of our landscape, and much of our national fabric has changed since then. We’re still crazy over baseball and apple pie, to be sure, but we’re also driven by unsurpassed corporate wealth, the Internet and … pizza.

A humble Italian food that once fed peasants, today pizza is a staple of the American diet. But it wasn’t always so, and we wouldn’t have the bustling pizza industry we have in 2010 (more than 70,000 pizzerias and $39 billion in annual sales) if it weren’t for one man’s change of focus in 1905. That man was named Gennaro Lombardi, and he was an Italian immigrant who ventured to the United States in 1897, like so many before and after him, to capitalize on the boundless opportunity that made America famous.

A baker by trade, Lombardi rented an apartment above the grocery store in which he worked upon his arrival in the Little Italy section of New York City. He often stayed late into the night baking pizzas that the grocer would sell out of his shop the next day. Eventually, Lombardi bought the building that housed the grocery store. It did not take him long to figure out that the thousands of nearby factory workers represented a growth market for his modest business. In 1905, at 32½ Spring Street, Lombardi’s became the first officially licensed pizzeria in the United States.

With all that was going on in the nation and world, it isn’t surprising that the birth of American pizza didn’t cause any ripples in the news. After all, pizza was still a poor man’s meal — and the U.S. had its collective eye focused on a revolution in Russia. Looking back, it’s easy to see that 1905 was an important year in history. Aside from the Russo-Japanese War and the aforementioned revolution that resulted from it, 1905 witnessed the founding of the city of Las Vegas and the birth of influential author Ayn Rand. Theodore Roosevelt began a full term as President, while Albert Einstein proffered his theory of relativity to the scientific community. The Wright Brothers put their third airplane in the sky, and this one flew for an impressive 39 minutes. The world’s fi rst U-boat was launched and novocaine was introduced. Christian Dior was born and Jules Verne died.

In New York, all eyes were on the baseball world: the New York Giants won the World Series by defeating the Philadelphia Athletics four games to one.

Amidst all this, Lombardi used his coal-fired oven to turn out thin-crusted beauties fashioned after the traditional pizza of his home city, Naples, Italy. His pizza was simple — tomato and cheese — and received a sterling reception from the lower-middle-class workers in his target market.

The kitchen at Lombardi’s was stocked with able and enterprising pizza makers, and many of them eventually left to start their own pizzerias. Chief among them was Anthony Pero (nicknamed Totonno), who opened the famed New York pizzeria, Totonno’s, in 1924 on Coney Island. Both Lombardi’s and Totonno’s still do a brisk business today and continue to win over critics and pizza lovers alike.

Through the 1920s many pizzerias that can be considered offshoots of Lombardi’s opened in and around Little Italy. It took two decades for pizzerias to gain a strong foothold in New York City’s other neighborhoods, but they eventually did just that. Even then, the typical American outside of New York wasn’t hip to pizza’s attributes. You had pockets — New Haven, Connecticut, for example — that served pizza to the masses, but they were few and far between.

The Chicago-style deep-dish pizza that’s so popular in the Midwest today was invented in 1941, and some claim it was the first truly American pizza. One thing is certain: the product was completely different from the Neapolitan style pizzas found in the Northeast.

Ironically, it took a World War for pizza to hit its stride. American soldiers stationed in Europe during WWII eventually developed a hankering for the food while on tour in Italy, and when they returned home they raved about it to family and friends. By the 1950s, pizzerias could be found in many of America’s cities and suburbs, even those further out to the West. According to American Heritage, the number of American pizza parlors grew from 500 in 1934 to 20,000 in 1956.

A new deck oven, fired not by wood or coal, but by gas, made pizza production easier and more convenient (and, down the road, conveyors would come into play). As a result, pizza-bythe- slice gained in popularity in New York and tiny pizzerias continued to proliferate throughout the nation. The first Pizza Hut, in fact, was opened in 1958 by Frank and Dean Carney in Wichita, Kansas.

The No. 2 chain, Domino’s, was born shortly thereafter when brothers Tom and James Monaghan borrowed $500 to purchase DomiNick’s Pizza in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1960. A year later James traded his share of the business to Tom for a car (a Volkswagen Beetle, for the record), and Tom changed the pizzeria’s name to Domino’s. What distinguished Domino’s from everyone else was the delivery aspect of the business.

Aside from witnessing the birth of Domino’s, the 1960s saw franchising become a hot growth vehicle. This continued through the following decade, and the 1970s were a period of major growth for pizza chains as they realized they could offer value pricing and gain market share through advertising. Pizza chains proliferated in the 1980s and some of today’s major players — Papa John’s, California Pizza Kitchen — popped onto the scene. In California, the “gourmet” pizzas many Americans enjoy today were invented by personalities like Alice Waters and Ed LaDou, the man who brought specialty pizzas to the repertoire at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant, Spago. During the 1980s, the pizza chains refined their practices and began a cutthroat price war that still defines the pizza category today. Meanwhile, independent pizzerias continued thriving with grassroots marketing, community involvement and a dedication to offering their customers hand-made pizzas topped with high quality ingredients.

More than 100 years after Gennaro Lombardi opened America’s first licensed pizzeria, the U.S. pizza market is filled to the brim with independents and chains alike. In fact, the pizza segment is one of the few foodservice categories that isn’t entirely dominated by major chains, and that’s part of what makes the industry so competitive, fresh and fun a century after its beginning in New York City.

Before Pizza Became 'American'

Pizza is much older than America itself. In fact, its precursor is believed to have originated in prehistoric times when Egyptians cooked bread on fl at, hot stones. Later down the road — approximately 1,000 years ago — Neapolitans began covering focaccia with herbs and spices, according to the Smithsonian. Next came pizza’s most direct ancestor, “Casa de nanza,” which were doughs pounded into thin crusts and topped with leftovers prior to baking.

Interestingly enough, early Europeans feared the tomato was poisonous. Native to the South American countries of Peru and Ecuador, tomatoes were introduced to Europe in the early 1500s by Spanish Conquistadors. But Europeans would not eat the tomato until nearly 150 years later when, in the late 1600s, some brave soul discovered the fruit was not only safe to consume, but delicious. This opened the door for modernday pizza as we know it, which was developed in Naples, Italy.

The world’s first pizzeria, Port’ Alba, opened in Naples in 1830. According to the Smithsonian, the pizzas there were cooked in an oven lined with lava from nearby Mount Vesuvius, a world-famous and historically important volcano. The early pizzas in Naples were flavored with oil, lard, tallow, cheese, tomato and often anchovies.

In 1889, Don Raffaele Esposito created the Margherita Pizza, which is adorned with nothing but tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil, in honor of Margherita Teresa Giovanni, who was the Italian Queen at the time.

Even today, the classic Margherita remains one of the world’s most popular pizzas.

Innovation gives you the ability to constantly re-invent and re-energize your brand, keeping you fresh and new in the customers’ minds while creating longevity for your business. I will touch on how innovation is critical to our slice business when combined with maximizing social media, improving customer service, creating customer excitement and ultimately building brand equity.

The world of social media at first can be overwhelming, but once you’ve seen the light on how effective it is in building brand awareness, you will never go back. Talking about and taking pictures of our innovations is how we maximize social media. Every week we create a “crazy pizza.” We dream up, say, a barbecue short rib and goat cheese pie, or a tequila lime shrimp pie, and we take a picture of it and immediately send it to all social media with a message. The message has a catchy headline followed by a delicious-sounding description of the ingredients and how they’re prepared. This does a few things: It makes people think about our pizza, thus encouraging them come in to try a slice; but more importantly, it gives us a platform to really sell our brand by talking about our quality ingredients.

Customer excitement about your product is what it’s all about! My goal is to get people excited about my brand, and the slice business and its innovations is how we do it. Every day we are experimenting with different pizzas to put in the case for display, so our cases are always full of a wide variety of color, cheeses, veggies, meats and crazy combinations—with the sole purpose of getting customers enthused.

We opened a store in the entrance to TD Garden, which is home to the Bruins and Celtics, and the pre-game rush is a great time for me to blend into the crowd and eavesdrop on customers eating the pizza. I track a customer as he or she walks up to the pizza case. I observe their reaction to the colorful offerings. Then I hover near them as they are eating to get real time uncensored feedback on the product.

Often, I approach those people and offer a coupon for their next visit as a thank you. But most importantly I am observing and listening to them. If their eyes aren’t wide as they approach the case and they aren’t happy as they eat, then I know we are not getting them excited about the product and appropriate training action is required. This is my inspiration to do what I do. My inspiration is to get people excited about looking at and eating my pizza. Innovation gets people excited!

Another opportunity for innovation is through seasonal or special-event pizza offerings. During the summer months, I experiment with seafood pies; then, I might follow the seasons with an autumn pizza featuring pureed sweet potato and a winter with hearty pot roast as an ingredient. Seasonal pizzas can also create the perception of using fresh local ingredients, which is a way of demonstrating the passion you have for your trade.

Special events can be another outlet for creativity. When the Bruins won the Stanley Cup this year, first of all I lost my mind; but second, we created a pizza replicating the Bruins logo and put it in the pizza case. People loved it. Sure, we didn’t really sell too many of those slices, but sometimes you don’t need to sell them if they’re creating the buzz you are looking for.

When it’s all said and done and you’ve completed that 16-hour day, finished cleaning the flour off your shoes and turned off the hood, how much brand equity have you earned today? Brand equity is that hard-fought and intangible thing that makes people choose you over the other guy. And it comes to those who think and act innovatively.

See Doug Ferriman at International Pizza Expo® / Click Here to Register for Pizza Expo

Doug Ferriman derives approximately 90 percent of revenues from sales of slices at his most recently opened Crazy Dough’s Pizza units in Boston. He’ll give a seminar at Pizza Expo 2012 on slice production, display, marketing, food costs and other necessities for slice success.