HOW WE GOT PEOPLE TO DISCONNECT FROM THE INTERNET FOR FREE PIZZA

The world loves pizza and Pizza Hut, possibly the world's greatest pizza, wanted to show some love right back. So during Earth Hour, we wanted to participate in a way beyond just switching off the lights because it's kind of hard to eat pizza in the dark.

In the US alone, the networks and data centers that power your social media, messaging services and streaming video consume 8 billion kWh more than household lighting. So instead of turning off the lights, we encouraged people to go offline. We created a website that only works without WiFi or data and little bit of internet sorcery. It asked people to disconnect from the internet for an entire hour to get free pizza and in turn, save up to 12% more energy than switching off the lights.

HOW IT WORKS

People visited www.offlinehour.me and were asked to switch off their WiFi or turn on Airplane Mode. Special code was built into the site to detect whether users had an active internet connection or not. Content was preloaded into the browser's cache before people were prompted to switch off their WiFi and/or data. Once people went dark, a countdown timer appeared on the page. Reconnecting your WiFi or data would cause the timer to stop and prompt users to go back offline. And if they managed to get through an entire hour offline, a pizza was coming their way.

RESULTS

- 10,000+ participants during Earth Hour

- 3,200+ combined total hours spent offline

- 7.4+ million people reached