Paving for Pizza
Domino's started fixing potholes in American towns and stamping the patches with its logo and the line "Oh yes we did." — because bumpy roads ruin pizza. A perfect insight-to-stunt loop: feels useful, looks absurd, photographs beautifully, and turned every repaired street into free, durable out-of-home advertising for the brand.
The story
Domino's noticed a small, true thing: when a delivery driver hits a pothole, the pizza inside the box slides, the cheese sticks to the lid, and the customer experience falls apart. So in 2018 they launched "Paving for Pizza" — a real program where the brand paid municipalities to fix potholes, and stencilled the repaired patches with the Domino's logo and the line "Oh yes we did." Towns applied for grants. News crews covered the patching. Photos of the stencilled potholes went viral on every social platform. The campaign turned a logistics complaint ("your pizza arrives wrecked") into a civic-good gesture ("we're literally fixing the roads"), and gave every local TV station a feel-good story to run. Out-of-home advertising that's also useful infrastructure is rare. This one paved the way for an entire wave of "brand acts, not brand ads."
Why it worked
It connected a felt customer pain to an outrageous, photographable solution, and turned every fix into a permanent ad.
Takeaway for marketers
If your brand solves an absurd version of a real customer problem, you don't need a TV budget — you need a press release.