This is the Noid. He's known to be one of the
worst restaurant mascots in history. It's not every day that you can say that your pizza mascot
prompted a full on hostage crisis. And yet this middle aged rabbit man. Yep, he's done it. But
if he is so bad, then why did Domino's Pizza recently decide to bring him back from the dead?
Spoiler alert, they did it to cover up a dirty little secret. So what are they hiding? That,
my friends, is what I aim to answer today. Hello Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, where we
always deliver your theories piping hot. Today we're looking at one of the most well-known
marketing campaigns of all time: Domino's, 30 minutes or less. See back at the end
of the 1970s, Domino's started to lag behind the success of Pizza Hut. Back then,
when um… 96% of you weren't even born yet, pizza delivery was something that only
a few local pizza restaurants did. No large chain was delivering their pizzas the
way that we have them today. Pizza was mostly a takeout food, something that you could see
here with Pizza Hut's first ever commercial, which shows a man driving his car through
town only to create waves of chaos that ripple throughout the neighborhood. The early days of
television advertising ladies and gentlemen. I just have so many questions about this, like, why
is this car so tiny? And who thought that inciting a neighborhood riot by running over people's feet
was a good way to shill for their pizza? Then again, I suppose it got me to think way too hard
about this commercial. So really, who's the true winner here? Buzz Buzz to the Pizza Hut, indeed.
Buzz buzz. Anyway, in an effort to one-up the hut, one of the owners of rival Pizzeria Domino's
had the brilliant idea of differentiating themselves by delivering their pizzas.
This was a godsend for families all over the country who were tired of having their
toes run over by large dads in tiny red cars. But not only was it enough to deliver the
pizza, Domino's then created the 30 minute or less guarantee. You'd have your pizza in a half
hour or you'd get half a dollar off your order. By 1979, they expanded it, 30 minutes or your
pizza's free. Domino's figured that they were making most of their deliveries well within
the window of time anyway, so giving a win-win guarantee to customers would only drive business
up and they were absolutely right about that. Sales skyrocketed. They went from opening their
200th location in 1978 to over 1000 stores open and a billion dollars in revenue just seven years
later. Though they were still number two behind Pizza Hut, Domino's had solidly carved out its
place. 54% of all pizza deliveries in the U.S. were coming from a Domino's restaurant. The 30
minutes or less slogan was such a huge success that it set the industry standard for delivery
times and it became ingrained in pop culture. There was just one teeny, tiny little problem
with that. Meeting the 30 minute deadline was difficult for a lot of drivers. Not only were they
dealing with traffic delays and road conditions, they were also fighting against customers looking
to game the system by turning off their lights to fool the delivery drivers into wasting time,
all in an effort to get some free pizza. Basically, the whole thing created a system that
encouraged reckless driving and irresponsibility. Stories of accidents and deaths started to
permeate into the public eye. Lawsuits started to crop up over injuries and damages caused by errant
drivers. In what simultaneously became one of the best marketing campaigns and worst backfires
in restaurant history. Domino's left a trail of literal death and destruction in their wake.
They needed to do something, and they needed to do something fast. And born out of this chaos one
creepy bunny man would emerge. To save the day, to take the heat, to distract away from all
the bad PR. And that man was the Noid. A mascot created to sweep everything under the rug, only
to have it all blow up in their faces ten times worse. Now weird mascots, they're nothing new. I
mean, we got a clown shilling for a burger place, bug eyed fuzz balls hawking sub sandwiches
and a disturbingly smooth man sexualizing floor bleach. But the Noid is not familiar.
He's not cute. He is not oddly sexy. He is just flat out disturbing. He's a middle
aged imp in red spandex with bunny ears. Yet somehow, somehow Domino's saw this guy and was
like, yeah, this guy, this shall be the character that helps us sell our pizza. Basically, he was
meant to embody everything that can possibly delay your delivery, the things that a-noid you
about getting the pizza and Domino's would then thwart him every time. Cold pizza, road problems,
smashed boxes. It was all on account of the Noid. And defying all known logic, the Noid was actually
a massive success. In fact, he was so successful that he spun off into everything from merch
to video games. Yep. You heard me. Games, plural. The first game released in 1989, aptly
named Avoid the Noid. We play a pizza delivery driver that has to go up 30 floors to deliver a
pizza to Doom Industries, all while an army of Noids try to stop you using everything from water
balloons to bazookas. If you lose, you're greeted to the most obnoxious video game laugh ever.
*Noid.. laugh?* Stand aside Final Fantasy X.
There's a new king in town. It was then followed up by a second and third game that had the Noid
going around town to accost locals with his yo yo and his terrible 3D platforming. Probably a
whole episode buried in here about branded food games. Yo-Noid, you are no cool spot, my friend.
In any case, people seem to forget about their hang ups with Domino's delivery as the pizza
company moved away from the 30 minutes or less and embraced their new slogan, Avoid the Noid.
Basically, everything was going according to plan for Domino's. That is until late 1989 when
Kenneth Lamar Noid, a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, entered an Atlanta Domino's
with a gun and held two employees at gunpoint, claiming that the villainous mascot
was created to mock him personally. Eventually, the hostages escaped and Kenneth was
apprehended. In the end, he was deemed unfit to stand trial due to reasons of insanity. Needless
to say, the bad press from the incident resulted in Domino's scaling back their marketing of the
Noid. And almost like clockwork, the following year they started to feel the heat again with
two high profile delivery driver crashes. They continued with the same slogan until 1993.
But after two lawsuits resulted in $79 million being paid out in damages, the officially
ended the 30 minute or less guarantee. And what happened to the Noid, you ask? Well, two
years later, in 1995, the company shelved the character permanently. When news started to spread
that Kenneth Lamar Noid had taken his own life. It seemed like the Noid was fated to live on as just
a weird oddity of pop culture and food history. Except now he's back. More than 35 years after
his introduction, the Noid has returned and is now starring in commercials again. Why now?
Is it nothing more than a nostalgia trip, or is there a more nefarious reason
behind that extremely disturbing face? I suspect that it's all a cover
up. The Noid’s reappearance was timed to coincide with a marketing campaign
advertising Domino's driverless cars. This time around, he's sporting a giant blow up
version of himself to block intersections and, you know, just casually a laser chainsaw. But
notice what I just said a second ago. Domino's is experimenting with driverless cars. It's
largely new and unproven technology. In short, I suspect that they're bringing out the
Noid preparing to explain away the flaws and accidents that they foresee in this driverless
fleet, just like they did all those years ago to distract away from the car accidents that
their delivery cars were getting into. This actually coincides with behavior
that we've seen in the past from the company. You see in 2008, Domino's stock price
was at an all time low. By this point in history, the public perception of Domino's Pizza was
in the tank, and Domino's made the incredibly risky decision of doing ads that were focused
on exactly that. The fact that they sucked. This began what was known as their turnaround
campaign, where the company went back to the drawing board and basically started
from scratch: New recipes, new flavors, new technology, all in an effort to win back the
trust of customers. And one of their key changes to the process was an online order tracker
as part of their push for order transparency, it allowed customers to know where their pizza was
at each and every stage of the process. And sure enough, who was there to coincide with that
launch? The Noid. In 2009, the Noid started to make a limited run appearance around the
edges of this big pizza turnaround campaign, mostly in the form of T-shirts.
I suspect that this was Domino's getting ready to unleash the Noid once again if
things started to go south. Luckily for them, the pizza turnaround was a massive success and the
Noid didn't need any further exposure. But he does seem to be the repeated fail safe. The guy that
gets rolled out any time there's a big corporate shake up or any chance of upsetting customers
because we see it all happening again in 2017, when there were small, subtle hints that
the Noid might be circulating once more. This time he started appearing as an Easter
egg in the background of certain commercials. If you blinked, you probably
missed him. Watch again. There he is. But why? Why is he just making
this random appearance? Just get people talking about the clip online? Maybe.
But this commercial was actually part of a larger campaign where Domino's started
experimenting with autonomous pizza delivery. In short, when a new campaign with
potentially disastrous results launches, the Noid is sure to follow, waiting in the
wings to take the blame and the PR attention away from whatever the real issue is. This also
would be far from the first time a company has used humor as a form of crisis management.
Back in 2018, KFC was being slammed with horrible press over chicken shortages that were
causing a majority of the restaurants to close. It was so bad that people were actually
calling the police to report these closures because of how ticked off they were that they
couldn't get their chicken. Some even did the unthinkable and went to Burger King.
I’ve had to go to Burger King. Anyway, in the midst of this firestorm,
KFC pulled out the FCK bucket. A simple and honestly very clever one page ad
that got so much love on the internet that people completely forgot their anger.
It seems this tactic is the same one that Domino's is using with the Noid, which honestly says more
about us as consumers than them as businesses. Don't be distracted by the funny bunny man. Have
some standards here, people. If this is indeed the tactic that they're using with Noid, it seems like
they might be on the right track for using it. The self-driving car campaign they're doing
has already caused issues. One woman was left chasing down her driverless vehicle in flip
flops because it wasn't programmed to double park in her driveway. The cars have also been
struggling with places like apartment buildings when customers don't come out in time. Much like
they did in 2009 and again in 2017, perhaps this soft relaunch of the Noid was in anticipation of
the problems that are going to arise if the press stories start to catch fire. For now, Domino's has
put a brief pause on expanding their self-driving experiment to the rest of the nation outside of
Houston. And correspondingly, the Noid left again with what seems to be his farewell tweet saying,
“see you later pizza haters”. But just know that the next time you see the Noid rearing his ugly
little red rabbit ears, what lurks underneath is a corporate decision that Domino's fears
is going to give them some severe backlash. In the end, his wacky antics are just meant to
distract us away from the dark underbelly of Domino's delivery. But hey! That's just
a theory. A FOOD THEORY! Bon appetit. Speaking of pizza, if you want to learn why
you should never order more than one topping on your pizza, take a bite out of the video on
the left. Or if you happen to be a l33t gamer, check out the video on the right where
we make a pizza out of Mountain Dew. It was a wild taste experience, as
always. I'll see you all next week.
