Tuesday, November 11

Honey, Can You Grab Me Another Widget Pizza Pocket?

As another example that we are all complete slackers, Pizza Hut announces their pizza-ordering widget (from Ad Age) allowing you to order directly from your Facebook page. It's impressive that they recently crossed the $1 billion mark in online pizza sales. But more telling that they realize those sales may not be generated directly on pizzahut.com moving forward.

The marketing allure of widgets is that they provide an opportunity to reach consumers on their social network pages, decreasing the reliance on your brand website to communicate with them. On the flip side, we are training consumers that they don't need to visit brand sites. Internet users are lazy when it comes to looking for information online. The more content that is fed to them, the less likely they are to seek it out.

We are fattening them up on forkfulls of bite-size information, to the point where they will become so bloated and lethargic that even the coolest viral microsite streaming game thing can't motivate them to leave their social network couch. Believe it or not, http://www.widgetpotato.com/ is still available.

2 comments:

Akash said...

Ha. It gets worse. This came out today in the Wall Street Journal.

You can now order a pizza through your television.

In a new promotion with TiVo Inc., Domino's Pizza Inc. will begin taking orders using only a TV set from customers who have broadband TiVo service. When a customer forwards through a commercial for Domino's, TiVo will flash a pop-up advertisement that asks the customer if she would like to order a pizza, then direct her to a Domino's ordering screen. http://tinyurl.com/589j5t

--stephen said...

There's my next post!