Pizza Hut Built an Offline-only Website to get People to Disconnect for Earth Hour

As the UAE geared up to join millions of people across the world in raising awareness of the issues facing the planet, Pizza Hut offered customers an alternative way to get involved – other than just having to turn off their lights. 

With its Offline Hour campaign, Pizza Hut encouraged people in two countries to disconnect from the internet during Earth Hour in order to win a free pizza. The campaign ran through a website, created by agency partner M&C SAATCHI UAE, that only works offline with no data, no WiFi and a bit of internet sorcery. Special code built into the back end allows the site to detect when users have no active internet connection and reveal a 60-minute countdown timer. If users go back online, the timer stops and they'll be prompted to go back offline in order to claim a free pizza.

“Earth Hour typically involves switching off lights between 8:30 – 9:30pm, but this is dinner time for many. Since it’s kind of hard to eat pizza in the dark, this year we wanted to encourage people to support a great cause in a different, but just as impactful, way,” said Beverley D’Cruz, chief brand officer, Pizza Hut META. 

Why disconnect? In the US alone, data centers consume eight billion kWh more annually than household lighting. It's a number that is growing proportionally with our reliance on internet-connected devices. With this in mind, Pizza Hut urged its customers to disconnect from the internet by turning off WiFi and data to reduce network and data center load, potentially saving more energy than turning a light switch off.

“We know how much the world loves pizza and we love the world right back. We can’t wait for everyone to demonstrate that love by disconnecting for one hour and look forward to rewarding those efforts with a chance to win free pizza,” continued Beverley.

Pizza Hut Offline Hour went live in the UAE and Oman markets last March 27th, 2021 during Earth Hour and saw hundreds of participants go offline for a whole hour to get their free pizza. The website is still live if you want to experience a little bit of this internet magic for yourself.