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This 1996 Pizza Hut Commercial Featuring Willie Nelson & Waylon Jennings Was PEAK Advertising
Take me back to the 90s.
Remember when commercials actually made you lean in and pay attention? They don’t make advertisements like they used to anymore, and maybe that’s because they peaked in the mid 1990s with spots like this one. Pizza Hut was in their bag when they needed to promote their new stuffed crust pizza, and decided to call upon two country music legends to help them out.
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings to be exact.
If any advertisers out there happen to be reading this, all you have to do to sell pizza (stuffed crust or not, doesn’t matter) is follow the blueprint this 90’s ad laid out. Take two country stars, create a duet that makes the audience think they are singing about a woman, and then have the big payoff be a musical reveal where Willie and Waylon were actually singing about stuffed crust pizza and pepperonis the whole time.
Celebrity endorsements in the modern day seem pushy and obnoxious, don’t they? I can’t think of the last time I saw a celebrity on my TV actually convince me to buy a product. And most of the “celebrities” are actually influencers or social media stars anyways.
Gone are the days where an established brand would roll out the Brinks truck to get a couple of icons to sing about their product or service and it actually work like this one. I don’t know how much the pizza place that claims “no one out-pizzas” them paid for Nelson and Jennings, but I do know that whatever it was, it was 100% worth it.
It’s a clever advertisement, features star power, and actually only presents itself as a pizza advertisement for maybe 15 seconds of its 30 second runtime. Maybe that’s the trick to getting people to pay attention to commercials nowadays? Don’t even let them know they are watching an ad, and make Willie Nelson sing this right at the very end:
“I gotta eat mine wrongways…”
Absolutely perfect. No notes.
You know the classic question of, “Where would you go if you had a time machine?” I’ve always struggled to answer that, but I think I know without a shadow of a doubt where I’d go now… to the taping of this Pizza Hut commercial in what looks like the middle of nowhere.
The 90s really were truly electric, and that’s because that decade kept things simple. The country music was better, the beer was colder, and the commercials were actually entertaining and worth watching (at least that’s how it seems as we nostalgically look back).
And if you watched the advertisement above and said to yourself, “I wish there was a little bit more to that,” you are in luck my friend. There are plenty of other commercials from the 90s that followed the “get a couple of country stars and have them promote your product” model.
Here are just a few that still hold up all these years later:
Clint Black & Alan Jackson For Miller Lite
George Strait For Bud Light
Alan Jackson For Ford (Ford Country/Ford Tough)
The post This 1996 Pizza Hut Commercial Featuring Willie Nelson & Waylon Jennings Was PEAK Advertising first appeared on Whiskey Riff.
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