Dominos App Featuring Hatsune Miku

2013advertising campaignclassic

Dominos App Featuring Hatsune Miku is a 2013 iOS app from Domino's Pizza Japan that let customers order pizza while taking photos and making dance clips with the Vocaloid star. Its awkward English-language launch video starring Domino's Japan CEO Scott Oelkers became a Western internet punchline and spawned a wave of YouTube Poop remixes.

advertising memesyoutube poop memesjapanese internet memesotaku culture memesfast food memes

Overview

Dominos App Featuring Hatsune Miku is an iOS app Domino's Pizza Japan released in March 2013 as a tie-in with Yamaha's VOCALOID crew4. Users could order pizza, take photos with the turquoise-haired virtual singer, and produce short clips of Miku dancing on top of a pizza box through a feature called "Pizza Stage Live." The app was Japan-only and shipped with exclusive Vocaloid songs performed by the character.

The pitch was that this was a real fan-facing product rather than a straight commercial, and Domino's own store crews had been writing the Miku tracks in the run-up to launch2. Outside Japan, coverage fixated on how odd it looked to see a global pizza chain hand its marketing to a holographic anime pop star1.

How It Spread

Western pop culture blogs jumped on the launch that same week and mostly ran with the strangeness angle. AdWeek's John Tejada wrote that Oelkers's enthusiasm "comes off as more than a little forced and awkward," calling the clip "either awful or awesome, depending on how you look at it"1. Kotaku, RocketNews24 and the Huffington Post published similar takes the same week, each fixating on the collision between a fast-food CEO and a virtual pop star.

YouTube Poop editors got to the announcement video within a day. As early as March 7, 2013, remixes started chopping Oelkers's lines and looping the character's name into off-color puns, most commonly reducing "Hatsune Miku" to just "me" so the CEO ended up saying things like "Have you heard of me?" and "Have some fun with me!"4. Search results for "hatsune miku domino's poop" ran into the thousands by that August.

Inside Japan the actual product landed. The limited-edition Miku-themed pizza boxes sold out nationwide within six days of release, and Domino's kept the Vocalo Creative Club archives up on its Nico Nico Douga channel afterwards alongside the finished Vocaloid tracks2.

Frequently Asked Questions

Dominos App Featuring Hatsune Miku

2013advertising campaignclassic

Dominos App Featuring Hatsune Miku is a 2013 iOS app from Domino's Pizza Japan that let customers order pizza while taking photos and making dance clips with the Vocaloid star. Its awkward English-language launch video starring Domino's Japan CEO Scott Oelkers became a Western internet punchline and spawned a wave of YouTube Poop remixes.

advertising memes youtube poop memes japanese internet memes otaku culture memes fast food memes

Overview

Dominos App Featuring Hatsune Miku is an iOS app Domino's Pizza Japan released in March 2013 as a tie-in with Yamaha's VOCALOID crew4. Users could order pizza, take photos with the turquoise-haired virtual singer, and produce short clips of Miku dancing on top of a pizza box through a feature called "Pizza Stage Live." The app was Japan-only and shipped with exclusive Vocaloid songs performed by the character.

The pitch was that this was a real fan-facing product rather than a straight commercial, and Domino's own store crews had been writing the Miku tracks in the run-up to launch2. Outside Japan, coverage fixated on how odd it looked to see a global pizza chain hand its marketing to a holographic anime pop star1.

How It Spread

Western pop culture blogs jumped on the launch that same week and mostly ran with the strangeness angle. AdWeek's John Tejada wrote that Oelkers's enthusiasm "comes off as more than a little forced and awkward," calling the clip "either awful or awesome, depending on how you look at it"1. Kotaku, RocketNews24 and the Huffington Post published similar takes the same week, each fixating on the collision between a fast-food CEO and a virtual pop star.

YouTube Poop editors got to the announcement video within a day. As early as March 7, 2013, remixes started chopping Oelkers's lines and looping the character's name into off-color puns, most commonly reducing "Hatsune Miku" to just "me" so the CEO ended up saying things like "Have you heard of me?" and "Have some fun with me!"4. Search results for "hatsune miku domino's poop" ran into the thousands by that August.

Inside Japan the actual product landed. The limited-edition Miku-themed pizza boxes sold out nationwide within six days of release, and Domino's kept the Vocalo Creative Club archives up on its Nico Nico Douga channel afterwards alongside the finished Vocaloid tracks2.

Frequently Asked Questions