[Apologies for being a day late, a bizarre combinations of technical difficulties prevented me from being able to log in yesterday.]
Last Wednesday, my dad got an email saying from Uno’s saying that that would be the last day they would be serving their signature deep-dish pizza. They cited rising production tied to the hand-made nature of the dough as making it just not cost-effective enough to keep around. (They apparently also made a similar tweet.) I was more confused than anything else, I rarely actually get deep dish when I go to Uno’s anyway. My family, while still having similar feelings towards the deepened dish, felt the need to place an order for takeout that night for the sake of having one last chance to get their hands on that dense, greasy pizza.
Shocked to find that Uno’s would undergo such a drastic change to their branding, I tried to dig a little deeper. Not a single news site had picked up what seemed to be the scoop of the century. For the sake of posterity, I took this screenshot of Uno’s’ website, as it looked on March 31s, littered with bold, in-your-face pride over their deep pizza.
On the day of reckoning, April 1st, it seems as though not much had changed.
Wait a minute… April 1st?
Oh goddammit.
I’m trying really hard not to just go all-out lefty “corporations bad” here, but between this and the Teletubbies Bitcoin thing (don’t look at me, I’m just as confused as you are), there seems to be this weird influx of brands just doing… a really bad job with April Fool’s this year.
If there is any salvation for April Fool’s brands this year, it may just be… cravy.
Heinz has been no stranger to bullshit sauce combinations as of late, with the Mayochup line of products. For the most part, these sauces are sensible flavor combinations marred by cursed names (or, at best, a clunky portmanteau by someone who’s never heard a portmanteau before). And, if you want to really stretch that definition, the latest “addition” to the line that they announced on April 1st this year still fits that bill. Conjuring images of the classic Thanksgiving flavors, Cravy boasted combining Heinz’s homestyle gravy with Ocean Spray cranberry sauce. And considering I typically prefer slathering my turkey with both gravy and cranberry sauce at the same time (if you’re really going to force me to eat turkey in the first place), so this didn’t seem like it would taste bad to me, but the fleshy pink color of the jar’s contents are a bit off-putting to say the least. Alas, they did not get the 250,000 “Indeed” votes needed to make it an official product (a number that was surely set so high precisely because they knew that level of engagement with an official brand social media account is just unheard of.)
Do you see the difference between these two instances? One of them you can actually get a laugh out of. It suggests a silly premise that’s still within the bounds of something the brand could actually do, and ultimately isn’t urging anyone to buy anything. The other was a targeted marketing campaign aimed at getting people absentmindedly skimming the promotions folder of their email to start panic-buying thick pizza. Like… please just try to remember the spirit of the holiday (or whatever you want to call it) next time.
And they didn’t even wait until April to do it? What the fuck is up with that?
