Aliens, Crippled Men Achieve Emotional Catharsis in Droga5’s First Pizza Hut Campaign

By Patrick Coffee 

Way back in March we learned that Deutsch would be defending the Pizza Hut business in a creative review, and very few were surprised when Droga5 eventually won the account as several agencies (apparently) voiced some variation on “Fine, let’s see what you guys can do with it.”

Today brings us the debut of Droga5’s first work for the chain, and we think it fair to call these ads emotional. Deutsch’s 2014 debut traced the Hut’s roots back to a little town in Italy, but Droga goes a bit further. Like, out of our solar system and our shared human experience.

The first two minute-long spots focus on a new product that our own planet didn’t even know it could do without: grilled cheese stuffed crust pizza. First, an alien wants nothing more than to leave our crappy planet, but he is still impressed by some of the things we mere mortals have managed to create. Who else would have thought to combine one type of cheese with another, unrelated type of cheese?!

Seems like poor Scott is too nice to tell Mr. Alien what he really thinks. Also, who decided that visitors from another world all need to have wide heads and large, opaque eyes? It was all those awful ’90s t-shirts you probably still see at 311 reunion shows, wasn’t it?!

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The combination of pizza (cheese) and grilled cheese (cheese) doesn’t just inspire extraterrestrial life forms to reach new emotional and developmental plateaus. It also helps real human beings come to more completely appreciate their own value as members of our big intergalactic ecosystem.

He can skip all jazz recorded after 1978 unless he means fusion or electronic music pretending to be fusion, which is really its own mostly mediocre sub-genre.

Today group creative director Scott Bell, who led this campaign, told Adweek that the “Bragsperson” concept is all about piquing a viewer’s curiosity and confusing them to a certain degree so they’ll focus on what really matters: the grilled cheese.

“They were the first to allow you to order pizza online, the first to deliver pizza to the White House, the first to deliver pizza to the space station,” he says. “There’s a lot of love for Pizza Hut in the world. But they’ve never bragged about these things, because they really are a humble company.”

That is kind of true. Unlike their chief competitor, the people at Pizza Hut don’t go around telling everybody that they’re a tech company now.

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