Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut

Piz­za Hut moved its $25 mil­lion account from Chiat/Day to BBDO in 1987. Billings had reached $200 mil­lion by 2009 when the account went to the Mar­tin Agency.

Like its par­ent com­pa­ny, Pep­si, the adver­tis­ing was often dri­ven by new prod­uct launch­es. There were sev­er­al: Big­foot, The Edge, The Sicil­ian, Stuffed Crust, the Big New York­er, the Lovers Line, etc. In between, there were pro­mo­tion­al deals and the occa­sion­al com­pet­i­tive swipes at Domi­no’s, Lit­tle Cae­sars, and Papa John’s.

I worked on Piz­za Hut on and off. Here are some of my favorites:

Half Price Deal | “Aircraft Carrier”

It’s rare when you can pro­mote a sim­ple half-price deal with a com­par­a­tive­ly elab­o­rate pro­duc­tion like this. We took a “Where will it end?” or “What if every­one did it?” approach. The music is from the film The Great Escape. This is a sen­ti­men­tal favorite since it ends on a New York land­mark. The spot won an ANDY.

Stuffed Crust Pizza | “Peter O’Toole”

Stuffed Crust Piz­za, with a ring of melt­ed cheese in the crust, was launched with a cam­paign fea­tur­ing celebri­ties dar­ing to eat it “the wrong way,” i.e., crust first. But we re-inter­pret­ed that as eat­ing it “back­wards,” and thought about peo­ple doing oth­er things backwards.

This evolved into an actor recit­ing his lines back­wards. The lines had to sound famil­iar even in reverse. We rec­og­nized that the first lines of Ham­let’s solil­o­quy are prob­a­bly the most famous, and so we would need a great, prefer­ably British, actor. For­tu­nate­ly, Peter O’Toole was avail­able. He had once played Ham­let in a pro­duc­tion direct­ed by Lau­rence Olivi­er no less.

This spot was a Cannes final­ist and won Gold in the New York Fes­ti­vals. O’Toole also won an award for Best Actor in a Com­mer­cial. (No doubt he dis­played it along­side his Oscar, Emmy, Gold­en Globes and BAFTAs.)


Stuffed Crust Lover’s Pizza | “Deion and Jerry”

Clients some­times sign celebri­ties and ask the agency to cre­ate a spot around them—which is not unlike the old Hol­ly­wood stu­dio sys­tem. (Visa was actu­al­ly pestered by celebri­ties inter­est­ed in appear­ing in its com­mer­cials.) We always pre­ferred to have the con­cept lead to a celebri­ty (or no celebri­ty at all), because then you have more cast­ing options.

In this case, Piz­za Hut enlist­ed Deion Sanders, who had just signed a then whop­ping $35 mil­lion con­tract with the Dal­las Cow­boys. The Raiders sup­pos­ed­ly offered him more mon­ey, but Cow­boys’ own­er Jer­ry Jones famous­ly agreed to let Deion play both offense and defense. On top of that, Sanders also played base­ball for the San Fran­cis­co Giants.

Our assign­ment was to use Sanders to intro­duce the Stuffed Crust Lover’s Pizza—a hybrid of a Stuffed Crust piz­za and a spe­cial­ty piz­za like Meat Lover’s or Pep­per­oni Lover’s. Rec­og­niz­ing that Sanders played both base­ball and foot­ball, and both offense and defense, and that this new piz­za was both Stuffed Crust and a Lover’s spe­cial­ty piz­za, the oper­a­tive word became “both.” This struc­ture allowed the view­er to antic­i­pate each of Deion’s respons­es, includ­ing the end gag refer­ring to his salary. This and the Visa Yao Ming spot for Visa are the clos­est I’ve come to a clas­sic Abbott & Costel­lo or bur­lesque routine.