Tuscani Pasta => FAIL

I don’t pretend to be a marketing expert, but every so often when I’m watching the TV in the evening I get a sickly taste in my mouth. A tragic advertisement will flash briefly across the screen pushing me to buy something or trying to enhance a brand name. Currently, that ad is one for a new range of pasta from Pizza Hut. I’m going to break my objections into two halves; the advertisement & the product.

The Advertisement

The ad starts with people eating dinner at a restaurant called ‘Tuscani’. They have hidden cameras much as you would find in a restaurant show like Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. All to make it seem like it’s a real restaurant. After the people have discussed convienently enough how creamy and excellent the pasta is, the chef(?) comes out and announces that he has a confession to make; He didn’t cook anything tonight it was all delivered by Pizza Hut. At this point the Pizza Hut people have appeared with ‘The Product’. There is delighted surprise & and applause. You can find the copy I found on youtube below (NB: The version below is slightly different than the Australian version, with a different chef & people, and different restaurant location).

Here is how the advertisement fails:

1. People don’t like being deceived – The restaurant is not real and therefore your ad is based on a lie.
2. People don’t react like that when deceived – Pull that kind of stunt in real life and people would be walking out and/or demanding the meal for free. *If* the ad were based on real events you’ve just defrauded 20-50 people out of their money.
3. No self respecting chef would (a) allow that to happen in his restaurant and (b) confess that to his customers – it would be a sure way to bankrupt your business.
4. You don’t have enough range for people to believe they are ordering from a restaurant menu (3 types over there, 2 here) – You can’t honestly make me believe EVERYBODY in the restaurant just happened to want the type of pasta that the tuscani range offers.

On the above note let me move on to ripping a hole in the product itself.

The Product

1. As mentioned above there are only 2 to 3 different options when it comes to the pastas you can get from pizza hut, this is a pitiful offering considering the fact that there are half a dozen ‘Pasta Pantry’ franchises sprinkled across the Sydney CBD and the range offered is outstanding(~20 different pasta dishes + salads, soups & other items).
2. A recent study found that pasta is the commonly eaten dish, fine, I can see how someone high up in pizza hut could want to include pasta in the menu – which results in a big FAIL for you my friend. Pasta is a common dish because it is probably the easiest thing in the world to cook short of boiling an egg or putting bread in the toaster.
3. Besides being super simple to make, it is also a staple in most diets because it is cheap enough to be affordable even on the tightest of budgets.
4. There is no vegetarian option. How FRACKING hard do you think it is to offer a vegetarian option (sorry, pet hate)

Conclusions

The Tuscani Pasta commercial is an epic fail.

The product: not cheap, not flexible and has a lousy range.

The commercial: dishonest, unrealistic and poorly conceived

EPIC FAIL

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