Cicis Pizza

The Challenge

When Cicis Pizza partnered with Arm Candy in 2025, the brand was focused on regaining its full pre-pandemic momentum. The mandate was not simply to optimize media buying—it was to fundamentally rethink how Cicis Pizza invested in growth. While the broader buffet category remained stuck in a post-pandemic fog and the industry trended downward, Arm Candy changed the momentum by moving the company away from a one-size-fits-all media model and toward a more precise, market-driven investment strategy.

The Result

Arm Candy restructured the media approach around a sophisticated store-tiering and investment framework, treating the Cicis Pizza footprint as a portfolio of distinct business opportunities. 
Broad value messaging and uniform investment levels were replaced with targeted, market-specific strategies. The result: Cicis Pizza broke free from category headwinds and delivered a 1.7% year-over-year increase in total sales—an achievement that seemed unlikely at the start of the year.

The Strategy

At the core of the turnaround was a tiered store investment strategy that replaced Cicis’ previous one-size-fits-all model. Across the brand’s 300+ restaurant footprint, Arm Candy’s Media Intelligence team analyzed sales patterns, store penetration, local market factors, and competitive dynamics to group locations into investment tiers. Each tier received a distinct media mix, budget level, and messaging approach, ensuring investment matched the specific opportunity within each market.

The Result

Precision Media Planning & Video-First Delivery

The media strategy was grounded in a key insight from CYRIS: restaurant brands win by capturing “share of stomach”, which requires sustained visibility and repeated exposure to drive action. CYRIS analysis also showed that video was the most effective format for delivering that level of reach and frequency. As a result, the plan was built on a video-first foundation, using a variety of video channels to efficiently scale visibility across the consumer journey.

Video was deployed across a mix of traditional and digital environments including linear TV, streaming, and social platforms such as Meta and TikTok, ensuring consistent presence while adapting to the realities of each market.

With this foundation in place, Arm Candy then operationalized the tiered investment framework. Each group of stores received a customized media mix and investment level based on:

• CYRIS media mix modeling: identifying the most effective channels for driving in-store sales
• Local media efficiency analysis: informing where higher-cost channels like TV could be justified
• Store penetration: determining whether markets required demand generation or demand capture

This resulted in fundamentally different approaches by market. High-penetration areas prioritized reach and frequency to maximize demand, while lower-penetration markets focused on building awareness and introducing the brand to new audiences. The final product was a media system that balanced scale with precision—anchored in a consistent video strategy, but flexible enough to maximize performance at the local level.

Price Point Messaging at Scale

The tiered investment model solved a long-standing operational barrier: the ability to advertise location-specific pricing.

With the framework in place, creative agency 3Headed Monster evolved Cicis Pizza’s messaging from broad value claims to specific, market-relevant price points. Locations offering a $9.99 buffet could finally promote that price directly—dramatically improving the clarity and competitiveness of the brand’s offer.

To-Go as a Growth Pillar

Arm Candy also identified off-premise dining as an opportunistic revenue stream. By treating To-Go as a primary growth pillar rather than a side service, Cicis Pizza saw double-digit growth in this segment, contributing meaningfully to overall sales growth in 2025 which we plan to build on for the future.

Rewards Program Test & Learn

A limited-time $2.99 rewards program offer served as the ultimate test of the demand-generation system built by the team in 2025. Within days of the media plan supporting the promotion:

• The Cicis Pizza app became #1 in the Food & Beverage category
• Daily store visits reached a peak of 17,500

The response validated that the new investment framework could drive immediate demand and measurable traffic at scale. Even more importantly, the program generated the highest-grossing sales week of the year.