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Matthew Jackson leads the digital marketing and AI strategy for Roman’s Pizza, a quick-service pizza restaurant in South Africa. He focuses on scaling growth and revenue value through AI-powered marketing as well as AI maturity within the company.
Roman’s Pizza has always been an ambitious brand. From students to families to young, working professionals, we’ve been able to capture a large audience of customers, making us South Africa’s second-largest pizza chain.
Our marketing goals have always been clear: reach hungry customers at scale and drive measurable growth across online orders via our app and our brick-and-mortar stores. However, since we offer both online and offline channels, measuring how our upper-funnel campaigns contribute to real business value has been a consistent marketing hurdle.
Until now, a multi-channel strategy across various social media platforms proved difficult to disambiguate whether upper-funnel engagement actually drove offline sales or online orders. So, based on changing consumer media habits, we knew we needed a native, digital video strategy on one platform — one that would translate video views to real revenue.
Unlike the controversial debate around pineapple on pizza, we no longer question the power of the upper funnel as a performance engine. Here’s how we used YouTube to reach a 24X increase in return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), while clearing the measurement fog around offline sales and online orders.
A tasty combination of AI, multi-format delivery, and creatives that connect
Our previous multi-channel strategy had campaign costs soaring without the benefit of profitable sales. Our cost-per-acquisitions (CPA) jumped to over 5X the price of an average meal order. That’s like paying for a pizza and only getting the crust!
In the quick-service restaurant industry, meal decisions happen fast. And, since the upper funnel constitutes the first stage of the consumer journey, we focused our video ad creatives on connecting with South Africans on three fronts: humour, sport and family.
Launched during the 2026 soccer World Cup, we took advantage of the fact that consumers would be using their smartphones and CTV devices more than usual to watch games, highlights and take part in online discussions.
This ad served as a familiar conversation a parent and a teenager may have, except with a comical twist highlighting the Sava Flava range.
On the strategic side, we went for a video view campaign (VVC) and tailored the formats using both vertical ads for YouTube Shorts and horizontal layouts for Connected TV (CTV) in living rooms.
We also relied on VVC’s automated ad delivery. The AI dynamically delegated asset delivery across formats and screens to reach each viewer at the optimal moment. Leveraging AI allowed us to optimise placements at a superhuman scale, freeing up our internal team to focus on high-level strategy and customer insights rather than manual ad-group adjustments.
Lastly, and most critically, we connected video views to in-store foot traffic. For the first time, we used Google’s store visit tracking tool which connected each time a physical visit to a store came from a previous online ad engagement.
This also gave us insight into a major consumer trend: many price-conscious South Africans who see our ads avoid third-party delivery fees by calling local branches directly or walking into physical stores to pick up their meals.
Results: Extra large sales with video views
The numbers we can take from this campaign are not just optional toppings — they’re the whole dish:
The measurement lessons we can take from this campaign are bolstering our long-term marketing blueprint too. Connecting online ad engagements to store visits helped us track the full consumer journey. Measuring physical store visits unlocks critical offline behaviours such as consumers who bypass third-party delivery apps and opt for our call-and-collect option. This closed a vital data hole in our measurement strategy and allowed the algorithm to find similar high-intent customers.
For Roman’s Pizza, upper-funnel video is no longer just about building awareness. It is now a measurable growth driver, helping us connect customer attention with real online and offline business outcomes.
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