Pizza Hut Projection Box, Brilliant or Meh?
Innovation is awesome and here at Zero Six Media, we love to look at innovative new ideas and see how they hold up to some scrutiny. Today we are taking a look at the recently announced Blockbuster Box by Pizza Hut to see if the hype is well founded.
The idea is simple, pizza and a movie have gone together like peanut butter and jelly for years and someone in the marketing team for Pizza Hut in Hong Kong decided to capitalize on that. The Blockbuster Box is a slightly larger pizza box that is shaped similarly to a home movie projector. It comes with a perforated circle that you punch out and insert a magnifying glass into that also comes with the box. The little plastic table that is in the center of the pizza and keeps the lid away from the cheese has been reshaped slightly to hold a smart phone. Finally, the entire thing comes with a code for an episode of a Netflix show/movie that you purchase when ordering.
You then crank your smart phone up to maximum brightness, put it in the box and the magnifying glass projects the image on the screen onto a wall.
On paper it sounds like a great idea, but we have some questions on the principles at work here. First, the idea requires that you remove the entire pizza from the box if you want to use the box while you eat the pizza, how many people actually do that? Secondly, in all the pictures of the actual projection itself, the image is not only quite small but it is very dim, see below.
The third question we have is who has a smart phone with battery capacity that can play an entire movie at maximum brightness? Seriously thought, because we want that phone. Fourth is a concern about getting grease all over your phone, it’s not really a question just kind of an ick factor.
The final observation we have is that in all the copy about the product it fails to mention that you can’t just use whatever movie you want. This is because the way the magnifier works reverses the image and makes everything backwards, requiring that the image input be flipped so the end projection is correct.
Our end take away is that there is some clever marketing at work here but it’s difficult to see if the end product is good.
But that is our two cents. If you are considering the purchase you may have to wait awhile because it’s only currently available in China. In the meantime you can test the principles at work with a 99 cent store magnifying glass and a shoebox; there are many walkthroughs on Pinterest.
