Creative Classics: why Domino’s award-winning ad is still underappreciated…

My argument isn’t that Domino’s ‘Paving for Pizza’ was ignored. Quite the opposite.

It’s that some campaigns are so brilliantly simple, so perfectly boxed and delivered, that they become easy to mentally file away as “obviously good” rather than properly canonised. 

Because when a campaign concept resurfaces years later wearing a different spray-painted logo, that tells me the original hasn’t been hung in the halls of creative inspiration, and hasn’t developed that untouchable status that I think it deserves—at least not this side of the Atlantic.

The idea is almost offensively simple.

Potholes ruin pizza. That’s the brief. That’s the strategy. That’s the campaign line. Chef’s kiss.

Picture the scene: you open the lid on your pizza to find that your lovingly assembled mozzarella masterpiece started life as a da Vinci, but somewhere in transit was launched skyward by Derek in a Nissan Qashqai, arriving on your doorstep looking a lot more Picasso.

When your entire business model depends on moving pizzas from one location to another in the best possible condition, anything that gets in the way of that process becomes the enemy of ‘good pizza’.

So, in 2018, Domino’s decided to fix roads. They got hold of a truck and a steamroller, decked out in their iconic blue and red, sprayed their logo onto fresh tarmac, and drove heroically into the sunset toward the next crater-ridden suburb.

In real terms, there isn’t one truck driving all over the US. Customers nominate their roads for treatment, then Domino’s works closely with local governments - departments with struggling maintenance budgets - to provide the grants that maintain roads. And they did it in all 50 states.

At Bottle, we’ll run through our rolodex of creative springboards - our Story Playlist - one of which we call “Pick A Fight”. Domino’s picked themselves a fight against a villain with no defenders.

Nobody is out there passionately advocating for potholes.

That’s part of what makes it so satisfying. They took the mundane and made it exciting. They took two outwardly unconnected things - “potholes” and “pizza” - and made them inseparable.

This campaign has been on my mind this month because I’ve seen the shadow of the idea appear again. This month, in the UK, two things happened. A pothole-fixing truck in Somerset got stuck in the same pothole it was sent to fix. (Google it, it’s incredible). And a UK brand launched its campaign to fix potholes in the general shape of the idea we’ve seen before.

Not identical. Our ideas are always really remixes. Every creative is borrowing, or stealing with pride. But this was in a form that was enough for me to wince and say, “Ooooo…that is a close one!”