OVERVIEW
Pizza Express is one of the UK's most recognised restaurant brands. Their paid social goal is simple: drive bookings. More bums on seats.
But their Meta account had stalled. Sound familiar?
A small internal design team was producing just a handful of concepts every couple of months, dictated by the above-the-line campaign cycle. The account was dominated by static imagery with barely any video. There was no structured testing process, no system for scaling winners, and limited understanding of what was actually driving performance.
The ads themselves were not bad. Promotional statics for well-known offers were ticking along. But they were one-dimensional. The same angles, the same formats, recycled over and over. No diversity. No velocity. No way to learn what was really working.
This is a problem we see constantly with bigger brands. The internal team simply cannot produce assets at the volume and pace that Meta demands. The result? A performance ceiling that no amount of media optimisation can fix.
Pizza Express needed a plug-in creative engine that could break through that bottleneck.
The Brief
The brief was focused and measurable: reduce cost per booking on Meta.
To get there, we needed to build a scalable creative system from the ground up. More concepts, more formats, more testing, more learning. Move the account from a slow, campaign-led production cycle to an agile, always-on operation that could deliver fresh assets every single week.
THE CHALLENGE
Legacy brands love polish. Pizza Express was no exception. Their instinct was towards beautiful, brand-led advertising. The kind of content that sings in a boardroom but gets scrolled past on a Friday night.
The biggest challenge was not tactical. It was cultural. We needed to earn the trust of a heritage brand and prove that lo-fi, creator-led social media ads could genuinely outperform their polished campaign assets. That a real person filming themselves enjoying pizza in-restaurant would drive more bookings than a professionally produced brand ad.
On top of that, the account had structural issues holding it back. The media mix was overwhelmingly static. Testing was infrequent and unstructured. The same promotional angles were running without any systematic approach to identifying what actually converted.
For any performance marketing manager or growth lead reading this: if your brand is sitting on great products but your creative pipeline is slow, one-dimensional and disconnected from performance data, this story will feel very familiar.
THE APPROACH
We plugged in our full Creative OS and got to work.
Our Creative OS is the engine behind everything we do. Six pillars, one continuous loop: Strategy → Ideation → Creation → Testing → Iteration → Insights We do not deliver a batch of ads and disappear. The Creative OS creates a constant feedback loop between what is performing in the account and what we produce next. It plugs directly into your paid social operation and acts as the creative engine behind your growth. No bottlenecks. No waiting for the next campaign cycle. Just a relentless pipeline of performance creative, informed by real data.
We got creators into Pizza Express restaurants. Real people, real food, real reactions. Native, social-first video content that felt authentic and stopped the scroll. This was a big leap for a brand used to polished above-the-line assets. But we know from experience that creator-led content consistently outperforms brand-led campaigns for acquisition on Meta. The data backed us up.
The account had been leaning on a narrow set of promotional messages. We broke it wide open. We tested specific dishes and flavours, rewards programme messaging, seasonal and limited-time offers, occasion-based angles, and tailored copy for different audience segments. This breadth of testing meant we could rapidly pinpoint which messages converted best and double down on the winners.
Creator video was the centrepiece, but we did not stop there. We introduced creator mashups, motion design, refreshed statics, lifestyle content and carousels. The aim was to give Meta the creative diversity it needs to optimise effectively, while building a library of proven formats we could scale and iterate on.
We built a structured weekly testing framework with clear parameters for every test. New concepts went into dedicated campaigns. Winners were graduated to scale. Underperformers were killed quickly and the learnings fed straight back into ideation. No guesswork. No gut feel. Just a systematic process for turning ad creative into measurable performance gains.
SOLUTION
Within weeks, Pizza Express had a paid social account that looked nothing like the one we inherited. Creator-led video sat alongside motion design, mashups, refreshed statics and lifestyle content, all feeding a structured weekly testing cycle instead of a slow, campaign-led drip. Every new concept had a clear path: test, learn, scale or kill, then feed straight back into the next round of ideation. What had been a handful of static concepts every couple of months became a constant pipeline of diverse, data-informed creative, giving Meta exactly what it needed to optimise and giving Pizza Express the volume and velocity their brand had never had on paid social before.
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