Work created at MOD Pizza, as an art director on the creative team.
MOD Pizza had been building equity in National Pineapple Day since 2019 — leaning into the internet’s favorite pizza debate as a path to generate brand awareness at an efficient cost. By 2022, the program had grown to include an in-store offer and generated 11.8 million impressions at a 64% lower cost-per-impression than historical campaigns. The 2023 brief pushed further: turn Pineapple Day into a genuine pop culture moment with a big idea that could activate across every channel and pull in brand partnerships.
I was involved in the Pineapple Day creative from 2020 onward and led the full creative execution for 2023. Working with our creative director and copywriter/head of social in a brainstorming session, we landed on anchoring the campaign around a physical PR stunt: a full takeover of MOD’s Pioneer Square location, wrapped in pineapple paraphernalia and designed to generate content that could fuel our national social and press push. I was responsible for all visual direction and design execution — the bold high-contrast yellow-and-black aesthetic, the halftone pineapple photography treatment, and the typographic system that ran across every asset. The Dole partnership was secured by the marketing team and handed to me to execute against — a collaboration we were excited about, as the Dole name added real credibility to the “pineapple belongs on pizza” proclamation.
The channel footprint was comprehensive: in-store POS, wild-posted posters around Seattle, paid and organic social (static and animated), email, push notifications, app, and web — all visually unified under the same aesthetic direction. I also created a suite of countdown and teaser story panels to build anticipation in the weeks before launch.
The campaign drove 68,000 promotion redemptions and a 23% year-over-year store traffic lift on Pineapple Day itself. The concept had enough momentum that it directly spawned a follow-on LTO: the MODern Hawaiian Pizza, a new menu item developed in response to community submissions during the campaign. I led the creative for that launch as well, extending the Pineapple Day visual system into a full digital campaign — email, app, paid social, web homepage takeover, and online ordering imagery — that positioned the new pizza as a community-inspired evolution of a classic.
Client: MOD Pizza Art Director/Designer: Dianne Vallier
