March Brandness begins with Pizza Hut trying to capture the basketball spirit with a new item they’re calling “Pie Tops.”
.@PizzaHut made "Pie Tops," with a button on the tongue to order pizza, for March Madness: https://t.co/q9hSqnqtLw pic.twitter.com/yLyxBlC9hO
— Adweek (@Adweek) March 1, 2017
These utterly fictional shoes serve like an Amazon button for pizza, and automatically place an order in a single press. Sounds like a neat idea, but I can’t think of a single occasion in the last five years I’ve been wearing shoes when I wanted a pizza delivered. This is the core problem.
What kind of people are making the decision to wear shoes and order pizza at the same time? Hopefully Pizza Hut’s March Madness ad would clear this up. Grant Hill would show me the way.
Hold up for a dang second here because this ad created way more questions than it answered. I just wanted to know why I’d use a shoe over the app and instead I’m left with a lot of questions about Grant Hill’s personal life.
- Does Grant Hill live in an empty basketball court now?
- Who is passing him the ball?
- Couldn’t they have gone to pick up the pizza?
- How is he getting WiFi in the arena so his pizza shoes would work?
- Does he unroll that carpet and set up his recliner every single time he’s done playing ball?
- That lamp is not plugged in. How is it working?
- Literally none of his electrical items are plugged in.
So we’re left with this stark image. Grant Hill alone on a basketball court surrounded by his unpowered electronics and lit with a single lamp that isn’t plugged in, either. The deliveryman approached him with a pizza, the only thing that brings Hill comfort. Thankfully it’s just $7.99, because life is hard when you live in a basketball court with no electricity.
Hill’s only contact is a basketball ghost. It passes him the ball under the cover of dark and vanishes when the pizza arrives. It’s a life of solitude and loneliness that causes us to reflect on our own emptiness.
No one out-pizzas the hut.