We love a success story, especially when it involves a long-standing partnership, a beloved hometown brand, and innovative marketing automation.
We are incredibly thrilled to announce that the team at HyperDrive, alongside our amazing partners at LaRosa’s Pizzeria, won the Best Experiential Campaign at this year’s 2026 AMA Cincinnati Pinnacle Awards! This prestigious recognition honors our work on LaRosa’s legendary stadium activation, “Strikeouts for Slices.”
Here is an inside look at how we connected live sports excitement with in-event activity to turn high-energy fan affinity into record-breaking performance and acquisition.
The Challenge: Turning Anonymous Fans into Known Customers
LaRosa’s Pizzeria already enjoys strong brand awareness and deep community roots throughout the Greater Cincinnati region. However, their primary opportunity with the “Strikeouts for Slices” promotion wasn’t visibility—it was individual data acquisition.
Every home game brings tens of thousands of passionate fans into Great American Ball Park, yet many remain completely “anonymous” to the brand. Our LaRosa’s team found a secure, reliable, and scalable way to integrate itself directly into the live game-day experience while capturing verified first-party data to drive future lifecycle marketing efforts.
Tying Pizza to Strikeouts (How it Works)
The activation centers on an unforgettable in-stadium trigger. The program rewards any fan with a ticket from that day’s game with a free small pizza if the Reds collectively get 11 strikeouts. Anticipation begins as the game progresses. The moment a Cincinnati Reds pitcher records the decisive 11th strikeout at a home game, a massive stadium-wide brand experience is unleashed, converting thousands of fans into a unified cheering section for free pizza. Their ticket is now a real-time, live-to-digital acquisition funnel.
Driving Engagement with Smart Technology
Delivering an instant user experience to thousands of fans simultaneously requires robust infrastructure behind the scenes. To support the scale, speed, and accuracy demanded by live gameplay, HyperDrive developed a three-stage technical framework:
- High-Capacity Mobile Landing Pages: We built a custom mobile landing page optimized to handle immediate, massive high-traffic spikes the exact second a qualifying game ends.
- Real-Time Data & Fraud Validation: To safeguard offer integrity, fans are required to input their valid MLB ticket number. HyperDrive built a custom backend application that allows the Reds organization to activate the reward directly from the press box at game completion. This app communicates with MLB ticket databases in real time to validate the unique purchase date and eliminate fraudulent entries.
- Instantly Fulfilled Automated Journeys: Once a fan’s ticket is authenticated, our marketing automation instantly fires an automated SMS and email fulfillment sequence. Within seconds, the fan moves from their stadium seat to a digital transaction, receiving a unique, 7-day-only coupon code sent straight to their device.
The Challenge: Turning Anonymous Fans into Known Customers
LaRosa’s Pizzeria already enjoys strong brand awareness and deep community roots throughout the Greater Cincinnati region. However, their primary opportunity with the “Strikeouts for Slices” promotion wasn’t visibility—it was individual data acquisition.
Every home game brings tens of thousands of passionate fans into Great American Ball Park, yet many remain completely “anonymous” to the brand. Our LaRosa’s team found a secure, reliable, and scalable way to integrate itself directly into the live game-day experience while capturing verified first-party data to drive future lifecycle marketing efforts.
Unprecedented Results: Exceeding All Benchmarks
While traditional promotional or experiential campaigns typically see industry-average redemption rates hovering around 1% to 2%, the 2025 season of “Strikeouts for Slices” absolutely shattered benchmarks:
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- Massive Scale: The program generated over 84,000 offer requests across 22 qualifying home games.
- Unprecedented Redemption: The campaign achieved an astounding 79% redemption rate, proving that live stadium energy can translate directly into real-world store transactions.
- Exponential Database Growth: Crucially, 83% of the participants were previously unidentifiable or completely inactive in the brand’s database. This unlocked a highly qualified new acquisition funnel of customers to feed directly into LaRosa’s ongoing lifecycle marketing program.
Why Experiential Marketing Must Be Built to Convert
The ultimate takeaway from LaRosa’s AMA Pinnacle win is that experiential marketing performs at its highest level when there is a great user experience. Fan intent during an emotional high point, immediately removing friction from the sign-up process, and connecting stadium actions straight to automated, owned CRM channels, turned a fun baseball tradition into a scalable, repeatable growth engine.
HyperDrive is incredibly proud of our long-standing partnership with LaRosa’s Pizzeria, and we are honored to share this Pinnacle Award milestone with them! We look forward to hitting it out of the park—and throwing more strikeouts—next season.
Ready to turn live consumer moments into measurable business growth? Let’s talk about building a custom, data-driven automation solution for your brand.