When Pizza Hut decided to create a national promotion earlier this year using popular music as the hook, the decision that followed was a no-brainer: use radio. "We needed something that got consumers excited and drove them into Pizza Hut and gave them a fresh reason to have The Big New Yorker pizza again," says Kathy Alexander, director of media services for the Dallas-based restaurant chain. "And we did that by partnering with CDNow."

When consumers purchased The Big New Yorker pizza for $9.99, they were given a CD jewel case, with an access code that allowed them to go to CDNow and build their very own CD from a library of available songs. So where did radio fit into this? "Radio became an integral part of this promotion because of its ability to reach the core music consumer," Alexander says. In this case, that audience was the 18-24-year-old 'echo boomer'. . . "This audience has always been pretty difficult to reach anyway because they don't watch a lot of TV," Alexander adds.

"We zero in on our target with radio," says Alexander, "because radio is specific to the individual and to the market. Radio is the most flexible medium and the one most open to 'stretch' because they're [stations] always looking for fresh ways to bring something different to their listeners."

Some 800,000 people, nationally, ended up participating in the CDNow promotion. Pizza Hut also succeeded in rolling over the double-digit sales increases it incurred during The Big New Yorker pizza launch a year earlier.

According to the New York Radio Market X-Ray, Pizza Hut is the eighth largest restaurant radio advertiser in the New York Market, airing regularly on about seven stations.