Role: Strategy, Scripting, Concept Creation, Copywriting

A 40th anniversary is a major milestone for any brand and for Cicis Pizza, the goal wasn’t to act like a legacy brand looking backward, but to reconnect with why people cared in the first place.

Coming off a previous brand campaign, awareness around Cicis’ core offering had become muddled. My role was to define the strategic direction for the anniversary, develop the central creative idea, and write the campaign’s script, tagline, and all supporting copy.

Anniversary campaigns often default to internal celebration full of discounts, deals, and self-congratulation. That wasn’t enough here.

The real question I was tasked with solving was:
How do you make a 40th birthday feel meaningful to the people who grew up with the brand and not just the people who work there?

We didn’t need to announce that Cicis had been around for 40 years. We needed to remind people what Cicis had been there for.

As I dug into audience behavior and social conversation, a pattern emerged quickly: people weren’t talking about Cicis in terms of product specs or price. They were sharing stories.

Birthday parties. Post-game meals. Family traditions. Escapes in the middle of a long day. Cicis wasn’t just a restaurant, instead it was a backdrop for moments people remembered.

The internet was full of guests instinctively defending the brand on social, often with surprisingly emotional stories. That made the strategy clear: the anniversary shouldn’t be about the brand’s history it should be about the memories people made inside it.

The core idea I developed was simple:
Bring real guest stories to life and let Cicis celebrate the people who made the last 40 years matter.

Rather than inventing nostalgia, the campaign reflected it back. The brand didn’t speak at people; it recognized moments they already felt ownership over.

I developed the campaign’s tagline and wrote a script built around shared, universal experiences, the kinds of moments that feel small at the time but stick with you years later. Additionally I wrote all copy for in store materials (cups, signs, etc) which was a first for me personally (I definitely stole a few cups to take home).

The 40th anniversary campaign reframed Cicis not as a legacy chain trying to stay relevant, but as a place that had quietly been part of people’s lives for decades.

By centering on real stories instead of brand mythology, the campaign gave guests a reason to talk about Cicis again, not because it was turning 40, but because it had been there for them all along.