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.