May07
call to action, pizza hut, animated gif
Pizza Hut Counts The Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds - A Lesson In Effective Call To Action
I really have to hand it to the marketing team or who ever develops Pizza Hut’s promotional emails. Yesterday, a colleague here at MindComet forwarded me an email from the international pizza chain. When I opened the email, I was thrilled, confused, shocked and awed by what I saw… a clock, counting down in real time.
My initial reaction was something to the effect of “how’d they manage to get Flash to render in my Gmail account!?“ Then I snapped back into reality and realized that was an impossibility. Only Apple Mail can render Flash, which I wasn’t using at the time. I had to know how they pulled this off… I went into Sherlock mode.
Upon investigating this—which consisted of re-formatting the source code—I concluded that they were simply using animated gifs in a very clever way.
The seconds gif counts down, with each frame lasting one second. The minutes gif also counted down, with one frame for each 60 seconds… You get the idea; although the hours and days images are just static images. If you refresh the email, the minutes and seconds numbers revert back to “59:59”. They address this inconsistency with fine print stating that the “clock does not reflect actual time”. So smart.
At any rate, this is an INCREDIBLY EFFECTIVE sales email… probably the best I’ve ever seen. The entire email is one big, giant call to action. See for yourself:
View the email hosted on their server to see the countdown clock in action.
UPDATE: The ‘day’ image has been switched from “10” to “9”. The image url may have something to do with it:
If you click on the link above, it defaults to “00”, but if you open the email or the web-hosted page today, it’ll read “09”. From the URL, it’s looking at the “Expirationdate” and counting down from 10 days compared to the date in the URL. If you change the 5.18.09 to 5.16.09, it’ll reflect the correct day! Tricky tricky!
Labels: animated gif, call to action, pizza hut
Posted by MindComet on May. 07, 2009
Wow! Great design, and I really like that time is running out idea. Thank you for sharing this Pizza Hut ad with us.
Posted by Restoration Media on 06/05/2009 11:40 AM