Screw you and the tweet you rode in on

I will confess to being very confused about what this ad is trying to accomplish.



First of all, I continue to be impressed that Papa John's is utterly incapable of making a commercial for their cheeseburger pizza that makes it look even slightly appealing. Look at that thing. It looks like a real chef overturned his scrap bucket onto it. And that cheese looks like Elmer's glue. I ate a lot of Papa John's pizza in college and it was fine, but who is really demanding these complex, evoking-other-foods recipes anyway? Well, I guess we're about to find out.

Papa John: "When we stopped selling the cheeseburger pizza, boy did I hear about it. @BiggBill7 writes..."

Well, we can all see what he wrote. This is an actual Twitter account with literally just those three tweets, posted back in November. The account has also favorited 13 tweets, 12 of which were posted by Papa John's (the last one merely references Papa John's). In other words, this account was almost certainly created by some Papa John's marketing intern (or an intern at their ad agency) several months ago JUST to set up this AMAZING ad.

So anyway, Papa John reveals "Big Bill" as... some eight-year-old kid or whatever. That is the punchline to this ad. The question is, what's the joke here? Who or what is it on? Is it:

(a) Poking fun at the kind of people who would go on Twitter to complain about not being able to get a specific variety of pizza anymore by implying that they're all children?

Ineffective, if so, since Papa John is openly suggesting that he brought the pizza back at least partly in response to such complaints. Also maybe kind of needlessly insulting to what I'd think would be a key demographic?

(b) Suggesting that the best market for a "cheeseburger pizza" is grade school children?

Kind of a problem since children don't usually make household purchasing decisions.

(c) Just a lazy joke with no real thought behind it at all, which frankly is what you'd expect from a guy who thinks he should appear in all his own ads and that putting pickles on a pizza was somehow a good idea?

Maybe!