What is One Bite Pizza?

The frozen pizza industry is a competitive one. Pizza is one of the most popular foods in the country, and frozen pizza brings you high-quality pizza at a low cost with extremely limited preparation needed. With deeply established names like Digiorno, Freschetta, Red Baron, it is a saturated market that isn’t friendly to newcomers trying to break into the industry. But in 2021, that is exactly what one new pizza option has done: One Bite Pizza.

One Bite Pizza is the latest product launch by Barstool Sports, the controversial but popular new media company. After successfully launching Pink Whitney, a pink lemonade vodka they created alongside New Amsterdam Vodka, Barstool Sports is entering the consumer-goods market. They have the social media following to hit the market running, and One Bite Pizza has done so.

One Bite Pizza just launched at the end of September as a result of a Barstool partnership with Happi Foodi, and it has already found its way into major retailers across the country. One Bite has been picked up by Walmart, is being sold online, and has seen a major tidal wave of social media response from Barstool’s rabid fans. The biggest reason for this immediate success? Dave Portnoy.

Who is Dave Portnoy?

Dave Portnoy is the founder and president of Barstool Sports, growing the company from a gag newspaper local to the Boston area to a major player in the social media, gambling, podcasting, and now consumer good industry. He is a lightning rod of a figure, with countless controversies, a track record of unleashing the Barstool mob on those who speak against him, and a history of combatting journalists. He is a polarizing person whose fans adore him just as much as those who say he’s an abhorrent person hate him.

Portnoy has been basing his image around the pizza industry for years. One Bite Pizza is his brainchild, and it is the product of years of work that led to him becoming the biggest pizza influencer with the most engagement on the internet. Portnoy has been posting pizza reviews for years, where he samples local pizza shops across the country and gives them a rating. These reviews generate major buzz for the restaurants he posts for, and they’re pretty much daily fixtures of his Instagram account, which has nearly 4 million followers.

The slogan of his well-known pizza reviews is “one bite, everyone knows the rules.” This slogan has become a widely-recited catchphrase of college students and Barstool lovers everywhere. It is a clever bit of branding that has allowed Portnoy to have a smooth entry into the pizza industry, even if he didn’t realize that was what he was building towards when he started. One Bite Pizza is the perfect extension of the Portnoy brand.

Barstool Sports is all about content, using brash personalities and social media figures to market products to consumers. This is all from the model Portnoy created with himself. He has long been the company’s face, someone who understands that to market to consumers best, you have to make them feel like they know and like you. With One Bite Pizza, Barstool’s first foray into the food industry, Portnoy extends the Barstool brand in a new direction, one very well-suited to the content he’s been creating for years.

What Can Brands Learn from This?

There are numerous lessons that brands can take away from the launch and immediate success of One Bite Pizza. It is essentially a case study in influencer marketing and the importance of influencer-product fit in a campaign. Dave Portnoy is a mega-influencer with millions of followers, a massive platform, and an extremely devoted audience. This makes him a perfect influencer for a brand to base their influencer marketing strategy on.

The whole point of influencer marketing is to pair a brand with an influencer capable of promoting that product to their following and seeing results. Influencer marketing has a major impact on both real sales and brand exposure if done correctly, and one of the most important factors in the success of a campaign is whether it is a fit for the influencer.

Every influencer cultivates a following for a different reason. Whether they are celebrities outside of social media or share content that appeals to a large number of people in a select group, understanding an influencer’s popularity helps you understand the value they provide. The best influencers for a business are often niche influencers whose primary audience aligns with the brand’s target audience. For example, an influencer that posts about their vegan lifestyle will have more value to a vegan product company than any other kind.

This is exactly what Dave Portnoy proves. A big part of his brand is built around pizza and social media. Naturally, he is the absolute perfect person to market a pizza company on social media, something that Happi Foodi was clever to realize. He is someone with a highly-engaged following interested in the product being sold, making him and One Bite Pizza a textbook example of influencer-product fit and an influencer marketing campaign gone right.

If you’re searching for a team experienced in influencer marketing that can help you develop customized, industry-specific influencer campaigns that deliver major results, Influence Hunter could be the ideal fit for you.

Influence Hunter has years of influencer marketing and social media experience and has helped numerous brands across industries create an influencer outreach strategy that drives significant ROI. To find out how we can help you, contact us today.