![]() 357 magnum revolver, holding two Domino’s employees hostage for five hours. ![]() The Noid was another popular campaign for Domino’s, which even resulted in a bizarre 1989 PC game called Avoid the Noid, where you played a pizza man having to dodge The Noid as a clock counted backwards from 30 minutes.Īll was going fine with this ad campaign until January 30, 1989, when a man named Kenneth Lamar Noid entered a Domino’s Pizza in Atlanta with a. “Avoid The Noid” became the company’s new slogan. In 1986, Domino’s introduced a new mascot named “ The Noid ,” a villainous claymation man in a bunny suit who acted as the personification of all the challenges Domino’s faced on hitting that 30-minute delivery time. Reckless driving wasn’t the only bad press that threatened the Domino’s promise either. Rumors swirled, and an unconfirmed statistic claiming that 20 deaths had been caused by Domino’s drivers before 1989 began to make the rounds, as well as an urban legend that a delivery driver had killed a child in an effort to make that 30-minute delivery time. There was good reason to feel this way, too - a 1989 car crash with a delivery driver left one woman with spinal injuries, while another crash in 1990 resulted in the death of a 41-year-old woman. While Domino’s was raking in the cash from their newfound success, they did have their fair share of critics who felt this promise encouraged dangerous driving by the pizza delivery guys. It became part of our lexicon, even playing a significant part in 2004’s Spider-Man 2, which took place a full decade after Domino’s ended the policy. In addition to Ninja Turtles, it was referenced on Married… with Children, Home Alone, The Simpsons, Garfield and Friends and just about everywhere else. The slogan was so catchy that it showed up in all sorts of media and persisted for decades after the offer ended. Not only did it vastly improve Domino’s market share, it ended up setting the industry standard for delivery times, which still holds today. To say that “30 minutes or less” was a success would be a huge understatement. (At the other end of the spectrum, though, some abused the policy, and turning off one’s porch lights so the driver couldn’t find them became somewhat commonplace.) In 1986, the offer was changed from free pizza to a discount of $3, hence Michelangelo proudly exclaiming, “Time’s up! Three bucks off,” when the pizza man is late in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As an added bonus for Domino’s, even when the pizzas were late, few people took them up on the free pizza, feeling it was unfair. ![]() It all seemed like a fairly safe bet: While there was no industry standard back then for pizza delivery times, Domino’s had usually been making their deliveries in less than 30 minutes anyway, so guaranteeing it seemed doable. Since Pizza Hut didn’t deliver, Domino’s CEO and founder Tom Monaghan decided to promote that his company not only delivered, they could also get you your pizza faster than your local pizzeria. At the time, Domino’s was lagging far behind Pizza Hut in the fast-food pizza marketplace. The slogan began inauspiciously enough more than a decade earlier, in 1979. The year was 1990, and Domino’s promise of delivering a pizza in “30 minutes or less” was still in full effect, even after some recent bad press threatened to end the policy for good. “Pizza dude’s got 30 seconds,” Michelangelo told his brother, as they stared at a full moon through a sewer grate.
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