Pizza Hut took pizza orders over Warzone's new proximity chat within days of launch

Pizza Hut Australia had been pushing into gaming through Hut Games, its in-house gaming team that sponsors streamers. Gaming audiences are hard to reach: they skip ads, and an online battle royale match cannot be paused to order food, so the usual answer — sponsorships and ads around the game — never touches the moment of hunger.

On 16 November 2022 Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 launched with proximity chat, a feature that lets players hear anyone nearby through their microphones. Within weeks of that launch, on the weekend of 3–4 December 2022, Pizza Hut and agency VMLY&R Commerce ran the Pizza Hunt: streamers playing as Pizza Hut delivery people entered the Al Mazrah map, announced themselves to the lobby, and any player who tracked them down within earshot could call out a pizza order over proximity chat and have a real free pizza delivered. The activation continued with Hut Games streamers Manik and GHHutz.

Trade press in Australia covered the launch the same week, and the campaign stayed in the conversation long enough to make the final shortlist stage of the D&AD Awards 2024 under Pizza Hut 'Pizza Hunt', credited to the agency by then merged into VML. Comment sections argued over whether it sold pizza or was an award play — but as an earned-media machine it worked: the hunt itself was content that stream audiences watched even if they never ordered.

Make the new voice feature the ordering channel itself

The feature was brand new, so building on it first earned attention no media budget could buy — the agency's ECD called capitalising on proximity chat 'days after launch' a real win.

The ad could not be skipped or blocked because it was not an ad: the ordering itself happened inside the game, through a mechanic players were still busy discovering.

The chase was the show. Streamers hunting delivery people entertained audiences beyond the lobby, so each order also produced watchable content.

Free pizza made the trial cheap for players and capped Pizza Hut's cost — the prize was presence in gaming culture, which Hut Games already existed to buy.

When a platform ships a new mechanic, whoever builds on it first owns the story. Pizza Hut treated the feature itself as media, so the ad could not be skipped because it was played, not watched.

The activation kept running through Hut Games streamers after launch weekend. In May 2024, Pizza Hut 'Pizza Hunt' made the final shortlist stage of the D&AD Awards, one of VML Australia's two shortlisted entries that year. Industry comment split between genuine praise and scepticism that it was built for juries rather than sales — the same debate that follows most in-game stunts — but the campaign is still cited as an early example of treating a game's own systems as a commerce channel.