People in many prairie towns and cities who want to get airline connections in major eastern or American transportation hubs have to board their flights very early in the morning.
It’s so early that they often don’t have time for breakfast, and they aren’t served anything resembling breakfast once aboard.
Surely the fatigue and hunger on just such a flight could be blamed for what I saw out the window of a plane last week.
It was a pizza.
An extra extra extra large pizza.
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With pepperoni.
Really, really big pepperoni.
And a slice was missing. A big piece, several hundred sq. feet in size.
I rubbed my eyes and confirmed the sighting just outside of the airport in Denver, Colorado. Built in a field, within what appeared to be a large irrigation pivot circle, was a giant Papa John’s pizza, complete with logo and promotion of a 100 percent whole wheat crust.
As a marketing gimmick, it was impressive. Hours later, the pizza was forgotten – until I attended a seminar put on by the National Agri-Marketing Association in Atlanta, Georgia, and met the inventor of the pizza crop circle promotion.
Kathie Thomas, director of innovation with Fleishman-Hillard, was the creative mind behind it, and she estimated that tens of thousands of people saw the strategically placed pizza when they flew into Denver for the Democratic National Convention last year. Papa John’s sales of pizzas with whole wheat crust rose 14 percent shortly afterward.
Thomas talked about the promotion as part of a presentation on encouraging innovation in marketing.
Given that another conference speaker estimated the average consumer sees more than 6,000 marketing messages each day, not including internet use, one can appreciate the importance of innovative marketing.
I don’t know if farmers see that many ads and promotions each day, but the total is sure to be a lot. And marketing to farmers is a complex endeavour that occupies more time, thought and man-hours than those same farmers probably realize.
Will travellers soon be seeing more promotions best viewed from planes? Well, when it comes to building aerial promotions, farmers must surely know how to do it best. They’ll be making their own designs on the landscape once seeding begins.
Come to think of it, they’ve been advertising their products for years, to all who fly over and all who drive by those black and green and yellow fields. Their innovation in crop production is as plain as a pizza on the Plains.
You can see a photo of the giant pizza here.
