CASE STUDY: MOD Pocket Pie

The Pocket Pie was MOD Pizza’s most ambitious product launch in years — a handheld, oven-fired pizza pocket developed specifically to capture Millennial and Gen Z lunch and snack occasions, a part of the day where MOD had historically underperformed. Consumer research showed strong purchase intent among competitive fast-casual customers and repeat trial rates, but the product was genuinely new territory for the brand: a different form factor, a different eating occasion, and a different competitive set than pizza or salads. The creative brief was explicit — this shoot would not follow standard pizza shoot guidelines. That meant building the visual language for a new product category essentially from scratch.

I owned the creative development: concept, visual direction, two photo shoots, and a 15-second video spot. Because the Pocket Pie had no established visual precedent within the brand, I ran a dedicated test shoot first to determine how to style the product, what angles would best communicate the handheld format and ingredient generosity, and how to make it feel craveable rather than merely functional. That test informed two full production photo shoots — one product-focused, one lifestyle — with distinct visual approaches for each intended use case across paid social, email, app, and web.

The video was produced at Illuxion Studios in Redmond using a motion-control robot, a camera rig system that allows for precisely repeatable, choreographed shots of food in motion. The result was a 15-second spot built around close, kinetic food photography with a distinctly “MOD Weird” energy — craveable, a little unexpected, and nothing like what the fast-casual category was doing at the time. The full paid media campaign ran across YouTube, Meta, and Snapchat in multiple crop formats and included both product-focused and meal deal static and animated executions.

Every touchpoint — paid social statics, animations, email, app, in-store POS, and web — was visually unified under the creative direction I developed, bringing a new product to market with a coherent, ownable aesthetic that fit squarely within the MOD brand while signaling that something genuinely new had arrived.

Client: MOD Pizza
Art Director (photography, video, & design)/Designer: Dianne Vallier

• Advertising Campaign
• Design Art Direction
• Graphic Design
• Photo Art Direction