Domino's App feat. Hatsune Miku

» see miku.dominos.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Domino's sells pizza in Turkey and has done for as long as I can remember paying attention to such things. The Turkish branch of the same chain was running the same red and blue boxes in the same years, and at no point did any of it involve a turquoise-haired synthesized pop star appearing on the lid when you held a phone over it. That part of Domino's existed only in Japan, and only for four years.

The app launched on 7 March 2013. Domino's Pizza Japan built it with Kayac as developer and Crypton Future Media, the company behind the Hatsune Miku voicebank, as the other half of the collaboration. Functionally it was the ordinary Domino's ordering app with Miku layered over everything. You could order a pizza and take augmented reality photographs with Miku. You could also listen to songs that Domino's Pizza Japan employees had composed in Vocaloid during the autumn of 2012.

The trick that people remember is the box. During certain windows, pizza ordered through the app arrived in a Miku-themed box, and scanning that box with the app summoned an augmented reality Miku to perform on top of it. Some of them were delivered on Miku-branded scooters. Six days after launch every Miku box in Japan was gone and they had to be restocked later that month. Domino's said sales ran at twice what they had forecast, and the app took an award at the 12th Mobile Advertising Awards that year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the commercial ~

The campaign is better known outside Japan for its advertisement than for the app. It featured Scott Oelkers, then the president of Domino's Pizza Japan, enthusing in English about the collaboration in a register that did not survive translation. Brian Ashcraft at Kotaku said it would totally weird you out and called it rather strange. Sean Ludwig at VentureBeat called it amazingly bad, said the attempt to generate excitement fell flat, and then conceded that if you did not understand English it might not be as terrible.

It went viral anyway, past 230,000 views quickly and over a million by the time Domino's Pizza Japan took it off their YouTube channel around March 2018. Taking it down is what made it famous a second time.

~ the lost media hunt ~

Once the video was gone from the official channel, finding it turned into a small genre. Nick Robinson made a documentary about tracking down the man from the video, then kept going: another on the ad that vanished from YouTube, a third on saving the app itself. The app build was eventually preserved and uploaded to the Internet Archive, which is now the only place the thing runs at all.

A pizza chain paid for the thing in 2013 and stopped caring about it well before 2017. The people who kept a copy did it for nothing.

~ what really happened ~

Nobody shut this down. There was no announcement and no farewell page, because by 2017 it was a four-year-old promotional app that had long since finished promoting anything. What ended it was Apple: iOS 11 removed support for 32-bit applications, so every app that had not been rebuilt for 64-bit stopped working. The ones nobody was maintaining came off the store. Domino's App feat. Hatsune Miku was one of thousands that died in that cull, and it is one of the very few anyone noticed.

The official site at miku.dominos.jp went with it. The last useful capture of it is from July 2014, when the campaign was still a going concern.

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