Aug 10, 2026 · 37 min · 9 segments
Pizza Hut's staff can't say the brand's name in the office anymore. They sing it. That's what a sonic asset does when it's working. Toyota has known it for decades: every brief there now starts with…
Nora-Kate O'ConnellGuest
Brittany RigbyHost
Evan RobertsGuest
Piero RuzzeneGuest
And Kate, when I've been having conversations about audio and creativity across the course of this podcast, we talk about jingles, and every single time, the Pizza Hut 90s jingle comes up, and this new work introduces Is it, is it a new piece of sonic identity at the very end, which is really distinctive and kind of hearkens back to that, but feels new and fresh? Why did this feel like important work to also show up in, in a, in an oral sound way?
So again, as you think about all the assets and like we talk about the pizza category, right? It's quite a commoditized category now.
And so the level of distinctiveness that's required to make sure we're not doing a category job, we're doing a brand job.
It was, you know, I kind of went and looked at the grid of like, what's the most distinctive brand assets and how do we make sure that we're building assets that are really clearly of and can be clearly connected to Pizza Hut.
And one of my big ones, again, coming back to the system one work and all of that is the sonic asset and the importance of the sonic asset.
And so my question to the global team is, do we have one? Do we have a global one? We're a global brand.
Do we have one? And the time when they came back to me and said, we don't.
And I was, you know, talked to Junior and I said, I feel like we really need to crack a good sonic asset.
So when people see you, they almost hear you and it becomes multisensory.
So they came back with various ways in and each of them I was like, no, that feels replicable.
They came back with the budget for a Sonic House and I was like, oh, okay, we're Challenger branded and if we can afford that... um love the love the thought but not sure anyway we kept going um at pace doing the the ad spots whatever and walk into the editing suite and the team I was so nervous at this stage because I knew the scripts was this the like panic
literally asking like um the team going how's it looking and they were kind of giving me those like sneaky eyes and they're like the work's really great and then even the words they were using I was like okay, what do you mean by that word? But anyway, I walked into the editing suite and they said, hey, so we also have a, what we think is a sonic asset.
I said, yeah, we've just played something, like pulled something together.
Our director and our ECD on the work actually just started playing around and created the sting at the end.
And Kate, when I've been having conversations about audio and creativity across the course of this podcast, we talk about jingles, and every single time, the Pizza Hut 90s jingle comes up, and this new work introduces Is it, is it a new piece of sonic identity at the very end, which is really distinctive and kind of hearkens back to that, but feels new and fresh? Why did this feel like important work to also show up in, in a, in an oral sound way?
So again, as you think about all the assets and like we talk about the pizza category, right? It's quite a commoditized category now.
And so the level of distinctiveness that's required to make sure we're not doing a category job, we're doing a brand job.
It was, you know, I kind of went and looked at the grid of like, what's the most distinctive brand assets and how do we make sure that we're building assets that are really clearly of and can be clearly connected to Pizza Hut.
And one of my big ones, again, coming back to the system one work and all of that is the sonic asset and the importance of the sonic asset.
And so my question to the global team is, do we have one? Do we have a global one? We're a global brand.
Do we have one? And the time when they came back to me and said, we don't.
And I was, you know, talked to Junior and I said, I feel like we really need to crack a good sonic asset.
So when people see you, they almost hear you and it becomes multisensory.
So they came back with various ways in and each of them I was like, no, that feels replicable.
They came back with the budget for a Sonic House and I was like, oh, okay, we're Challenger branded and if we can afford that... um love the love the thought but not sure anyway we kept going um at pace doing the the ad spots whatever and walk into the editing suite and the team I was so nervous at this stage because I knew the scripts was this the like panic
literally asking like um the team going how's it looking and they were kind of giving me those like sneaky eyes and they're like the work's really great and then even the words they were using I was like okay, what do you mean by that word? But anyway, I walked into the editing suite and they said, hey, so we also have a, what we think is a sonic asset.
I said, yeah, we've just played something, like pulled something together.
Our director and our ECD on the work actually just started playing around and created the sting at the end.
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