Papa John's & Crowdsourcing A Pizza

We have seen brands use online communities before to create or evolve new products -  one of the best uses of crowdsourcing in our opinion - and so far the great examples have to be the Dunkin Donuts "Create The Next Donut" competition and Mountain Dews extremely successful campaign DEWmocracy. But now US pizza joint Papa John's are turning to Facebook to find their next specialty pizza.

The Papa’s Specialty Pizza Challenge tasks Facebook fans with creating the winning recipe for the company’s next specialty pizza. Creating a new pizza through the application is pretty simple - as a user you can name your pizza as well as select the crust thinkness, pick the sauce and add up to seven toppings. The resulting creation is then posted on Papa John's page where other fans can like or share your pizza creation. In my mind this is very clever because it means that each individual pizza creation is easily shard with literally thousands of people.

Once you have created a pizza you are then required to promote it in order to get into the finalists group (the top three submissions). These three pizzas will then be added to the Papa John's menu and sold in stores during the month of August 2010. During this time each finalist is also given a budget of $1000 that they must use to promote their pizza even more, with the ultimate aim of becoming the grand prize winner -  which will land you 1% of pizza sales post challenge, pizza for life and a guest appearance in the next Papa John's TV spot. Over all not the most original crowdsourcing campaign but it is sure to be very effective and who knows how many legs it will grow!