Food Theory: Domino’s WORST Nightmare is Back! (The Noid)

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 Fo

od 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 takeou

t 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 thi

nk 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 billi

on 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 se

ll 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 1

989, 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 h

is 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 Atlan

ta 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 d

river 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 n

ow 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 kn

ow, 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 effo

rt 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 Domin

o'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 ap

pearing 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  win

gs 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 un

thinkable 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 relaun

ch 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 d

ecision 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 Mountai

n Dew. It was a wild taste experience, as  always. I'll see you all next week.