The Pizza Hut-ization of Youth Electoral Politics

Recently, political “hub” Pizza Hut released an ad on YouTube encouraging youth to vote in the upcoming election. With the tagline, “It’s your choice. Please vote,” Pizza Hut likely feels it has done its civic duty to encourage the lazy, sofa-lounging, pizza-eating members of the Millennial Generation to get up off the couch and go vote.

This is the Pizza Hut-ization of youth voter politics. The message: You are incapable of even listening to a normal election ad telling you to go vote.

Let’s give Pizza Hut a little credit and assume for the sake of argument that its portrayal is accurate. If this is the case, then youth, after viewing the commercial, will likely just call their local Pizza Hut or place an order for a pie online. If youth really are this stupid and lazy, it will not cause them to go vote.

Yet, if we take a second view of the Millennial Generation, as a generation with many questions and a critical eye, they will react to the commercial as I did, wondering whose idea that commercial was and why they were ever put in charge of developing a piece to target youth voters. Slapping something on YouTube does not give you instant “street cred.” (Caveat Emptor Corporate America)

This is but one example of the “dumbing” down of the American polis. Have we lost so much so much faith in young America that we have resorted to such amateur methods to reach out to a group that by other measures, education, technology, and networking, is an advanced generation.

What would help is if Pizza Hut would instead of creating ads for their pizza, donate pizza to all the young poll workers, precinct walkers, campaign staffers, and youth voter groups around the country, comprised of driven and capable members of the Millennial Generation. I may be at the tail end of this Generation and often wonder “why” at some of things they do, but even I will give them a little credit.

Even more dangerous is the prospect that this is just one example of the wave of corporate-sponsored political ads to come. It somehow cheapens the electoral process when marketers invade the political market using the same tactics they use to sell pizza to sell politics.

The ironic part of this ad to me is the fact that in college, I constantly had debates within student government with my colleagues about giving out pizza to get students to participate in campus politics. If I had known that five years later this would become a national trend, perhaps it would have been prudent to pitch this tactic.

Damn pizza.