As the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs came to an end on Monday, Panago Pizza continued its AI-powered campaign celebrating wild facial hair throughout the postseason.

The pizza chain has asked hockey fans throughout the NHL playoffs to show support for their favourite team by rewarding people showing off images on Instagram of AI-generated payoff beards with free pizza. Refusing to shave your face until your team has been eliminated has long been a tradition in the NHL playoffs, and Panago incorporated the practice into its campaign for a playoff season that saw four Canadian teams qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Heading into the third round of the playoffs, one Canadian team is still left standing in the Edmonton Oilers.

The AI images include men, women, babies, animals, cartoon characters and more sporting playoff beards. Dan Bache, creative director at Work Party Creative, says the campaign is part of an overall plan to expand Panago’s marketing to encompass more than just the sales and promotional tactics that it’s primarily utilized since the 1980s. With this campaign, he says the brand is trying to connect with mainstream culture.

“They’ve been around since the ‘80s, they’ve been doing the same thing as social media and culture becomes a bigger role in people’s lives, we need to find ways to slip into those conversations and intersections. So I think it’s just feeling like a younger brand,” Bache tells strategy.

Bache says that part of that effort to act and feel a little younger is pushing a campaign that helps people feel like part of a bigger movement through cheering for Canadian NHL teams, and by sharing user-generated images through social media, utilizing AI to feel connected to a larger community.

The NHL playoffs also felt timely for Panago to launch a new campaign, with watch parties across the country where fans order pizza while the postseason is on.

At first, Bache says the brand wasn’t sure how successful the campaign would be, but Meta’s new AI image generator tool on Instagram lowered the barrier to entry and engagement for the campaign, and saw nearly 100 submissions within 90 minutes of the campaign launch.

“Sometimes you’ve got to let the internet do its thing. It needs to be simple enough – that was our biggest thing, trying to make it as dead simple as possible, and then let the internet go nuts. In our opinion, the weirder, the better. If the AI makes glitches, that’s all part of the fun,” Bache says. 

“It all connects the brand to a moment in time. AI is an intimidating word for a lot of people, but this campaign shows there’s a lot of fun in the social part of it.”

The social campaign was developed with the help of the Work Party Creative agency, and is designed to help Panago fit into one of the country’s biggest cultural moments, the NHL playoffs.