I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There are only two types of taglines – great and “other.” For your consideration in the category of “other,” I present the mind-bending output from the new agency of record for Pizza Hut.
Hundreds of agency hours of desk research, customer interviews, ethnography and focus group interpretation, customer analytics, and some creatives playing foosball or whatever they do nowadays, and here we have it from the Martin Agency: “Your Pizza Hut.” Just in time for the Super Bowl.
The creative premise? “Any pizza, any size, any crust and any topping.” Hmmm. Just like every other pizza place. And just like it was, by the way, when I was a kid in the 60s. Oh, and it’s affordable. Which is what put pizza in “commodity” status even earlier than then.
For anyone at a loss for a zippy tagline, this is the oldest fallback position in the book. It works with anything. Your Citibank. Your Radio Shack. Your Walmart. Your Kmart. Your Ford. Yorba Linda. You’re a Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Google “Your Hometown Bank.” Pages and pages, all different banks. Thank God there are so many different hometowns.
And while we’re at it, why not have parent company Yum adopt this for its other holdings? Your Taco Bell. Your KFC. Or Your Kentucky Fried Chicken, in case Yum reverses course on the “KFC thing” for, um, the second time.
Overthinking it wasn’t limited to Pizza Hut’s tagline. The new positioning reeks, in its entirety. More on that tomorrow in Part 2 of this post.
I’ll bet you a pizza this tagline will be gone a year from now.
If there’s any good news in this story, it would be that Pizza Hut has at least moved one level up from the deep sand or whatever is down there on the ocean floor of taglines. Its previous tagline? “America's Best Pizza.”
