See Pizza Hut Australia's 'National Pizza Party Day' Online Prize Wheel

By Sean Norris

National Pizza Party Day is May 20, and Pizza Hut is celebrating with a fun online promotion. Well, Pizza Hut Australia, anyway. While there's plenty of NPPD fanfare around the internet, U.S. Pizza Huts do not appear to be partaking.

This brings up several questions, like:

Why isn't Pizza Hut doing anything for National Pizza Party Day in the U.S.?
Shouldn't it be "International" Pizza Party Day if Australia is also celebrating on the same day?
Can't every day be National Pizza Party Day if you dream big enough?

Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, Pizza Hut Australia's National Pizza Party Day promotion.

To celebrate the most sacred of holidays, the brand is featuring a digital prize wheel on its website. Fans who place an online order between May 20 and May 29 can spin the wheel for a chance at a number of prizes, including your usual assortment of free menu items and gift cards, along with a $10,000 grand prize.

But, more importantly, there are also a pair of branded products available: a trucker hat and a can cooler. And these come with a fun twist: Both items are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themed. Cowabunga!

https://twitter.com/PizzaHutAU/status/1526427324157132800?s=20&t=u7kJ3biTMFfoV7bfbTGjbw

Actually, the entire promotion is co-branded with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—specifically, the '90s cartoon versions. Which makes a lot of sense.

There may not be another pop culture property more intrinsically linked to pizza than the Ninja Turtles, whose entire personalities are based around it. (Seriously, the Turtle Boys were always scarfing pizza.) And Pizza Hut has not been shy about leaning into nostalgia for its marketing. This fits right in with the brand's previous efforts.

The merchandise is just a smaller part of the overall effort here, but that's what we like about it. The items are exclusive to this promotion and have the lowest odds of winning. (There are just 2,000 hats and 1,000 can coolers available, versus a combined 100,000 free menu items.) This incentivizes TMNT fans and collectors to order more pizzas.

It also shows that branded merchandise fits in just about any promotional campaign, even if it's not the centerpiece. Brands can go all out with high-profile merch collabs, like Panera Bread just did with T-Pain, but they can also build merchandise into a larger promotional effort in more subtle ways.

Now, does anyone have a phone number for the United Nations? We need to clear up this "National" versus "International" thing asap.