No other pizza has developed as much of a cult-like following as Little Caesars’ Pretzel Crust. And ever since it left our menu almost two years ago, Pretzel Crust fanatics have gone to great lengths to bring it back. Some went as far as freezing pizzas to enjoy months later. Others started Facebook groups and online petitions. And one fan even picketed outside the company headquarters (yes, really).

So, when announcing its return, we decided to use these pretzel-crazed maniacs to our advantage, turning them into 100% unpaid social media influencers who would talk about our product for us 24/7.

By giving fans a chance to #UnlockPretzelCrust, along with unique pretzel-themed prizes, all before the pizza was even back, we knew they would talk about it, tweet about it, and obsess about it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We began by hiding secret codes across both the digital and real worlds — codes that would inevitably #UnlockPretzelCrust and awesome pretzel-themed prizes. Over the course of three weeks, we hid codes in crop circles. At hockey games. In our commercials. We hid codes in our code. In our posts. Heck, we even hid them in the middle of nowhere.

Once fans knew these codes could be anywhere, suddenly they were talking about them everywhere — on their feeds and even deep within the threads on Reddit. And once we saw that, we decided to go where few brands dare to go, and hid them there, too, inside a billion-pixel Pretzel Crust photo hunt.

By giving them a mission, we had officially turned our Pretzel Crust fanatics into unofficial Pretzel Crust ambassadors, even offering one of them a completely ridiculous but totally real job as our “Chief Pretzel Officer.”

So, did it work? Well, let’s just say that after 72 million social impressions and a 700% increase in conversation, Little Caesars pizza sales soared. And it was all thanks to a group of “influencers” as unique as our pizza itself.