my work

Rita's Italian Ice

Agency: Lorel Marketing Group

Rita's Italian Ice is a frozen dessert franchise with approximately 700 locations across the eastern United States. Most stores open on the first Day of Spring - this day is the busiest day of the year in terms of volume and one-day revenue. Lorel capitalized on this through a number of successful campaigns launching on the first day of spring.

The first was a "Mystery Flavor" microsite where fans tasted an unknown flavor and come to the site to place a name and/or vote on another submission. This campaign received over 30,000 entries with over 2.2 million votes. It was so popular it was even picked up by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert.

The following year, In conjunction with Just Born's Peeps, we developed a co-branded Facebook contest. The primary goal of the campaign was to build Rita's Facebook fan base. The sweepstakes offered Facebook users the chance to win prizes simply for becoming a fan of Rita's. We had over 43,000 email addresses, 67,000 shares through Facebook and 105,000 new Facebook fans. The during our campaign Rita's Fan page was the 17th most popular page in all of Facebook.

I oversaw the web strategy on these campaigns along with the user-experience/wireframe development for all programs.