#275 2018 · Domino's · Food deliverywrong-door
Domino's, blamed for pizzas jostled to pieces in the box, decided the box was fine and started repaving the potholes underneath the delivery car
the problem
Potholes bounced pizzas apart before they arrived
background
Domino's had spent years re-engineering the pizza box itself — corner posts, vented lids, the works — to keep a pie from sliding into a corner during delivery. Customer complaints about jostled, lopsided pizza kept coming anyway, and the obvious next move for a food company is always more packaging engineering: a stiffer box, a better tray, a redesigned lid.
In June 2018 Domino's instead launched 'Paving for Pizza': a microsite inviting customers to nominate cracked, pothole-riddled roads in their town, with Domino's paying municipalities small grants to get the potholes actually repaired, on the public record, before delivery day.
the move
Domino's, working with agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, offered towns roughly $5,000 grants to fix nominated potholes, on the condition that crews stencil the Domino's logo and the tagline 'Oh yes we did' onto the freshly repaired pavement. The company framed it as protecting pizza quality on the 'last mile,' but the real target was the last mile itself, not the box riding over it.
the payoff
Pilot repairs ran in three towns in late 2017/early 2018; the public campaign launched June 11, 2018 and drew tens of thousands of nominations in its first week, growing to roughly 170,000 nominations from 16,000 zip codes and 500,000 microsite visits, with grants eventually reaching about 20 towns. Domino's said the campaign generated over 1.1 billion traditional media impressions and, within 48 hours of launch, roughly 700 press stories and 100,000 Twitter mentions — largely earned rather than paid reach. Reporting also found towns spent real uncompensated staff time on contracts and coordination for a $5,000 grant, and at least one resident publicly worried about a fast-food chain buying informal influence over municipal road priorities — this was PR-grade infrastructure spending, not a road-maintenance program, and Domino's itself never claimed it moved sales.
what came after
Became a widely cited case study in marketing courses and trade press for finding advertising whitespace in an unmediated surface (the road itself) rather than buying another ad slot, and for treating a packaging complaint as a delivery-infrastructure problem instead.
references
- [1]Domino's fixes roads in move to 'save' pizzaCBS News, 2018cbsnews.com
- [2]The Inside Story of How Domino's Got Its Advertising on PotholesVice, 2018vice.com