Brief:

• Domino's is letting customers submit hotspot location recommendations for pizza delivery throughout the U.S., according to a press release. In April, the pizza chain launched the hotspot delivery service for 150,000 locations without traditional addresses, such as dog parks, beaches and sports fields.
• Customers can identify a location on the delivery map for their nearest store and mark it as a potential Domino's hotspot for a local franchisee to review. The pizza chain is also rolling out a TV campaign featuring a company ambassador who kicks off "grand openings" of each new hotspot with a ribbon-cutting.
• Customers can place orders for hotspots delivery online through the Domino's website or on the mobile apps. Before checking out, customers can leave instructions to help the driver find them at the nontraditional addresses. Text messages then alert customers on delivery status.

Insight:

Domino's latest hotspot campaign comes as summer approaches and more people spend time outdoors at beaches, parks and other venues where they may want to order pizza for picnics, birthdays or Little League games. Though Domino's determined the location of its first batch of hotspots by consulting its 5,200 restaurants in the U.S., asking customers for more suggestions will guide the company in selecting additional locations that its customers want and will actually use.

The accompanying TV campaign is a lighthearted, quick way to demonstrate how hotspots work while encouraging downloads of its mobile app. The campaign includes Domino's first-ever ad in The New York Times that ran earlier this week. At first glance, the ad looks like the chain's iconic domino logo, but at further inspection the image is composed of the names of thousands of locations where the chain now delivers, Ad Age reported.

This summer-focused delivery campaign comes as Domino's ramps up its mobile efforts. In the past decade, the pizza chain has added several mobile-based services and began describing itself as an "e-commerce company that happens to sell pizza." The company introduced its "pizza tracker" service in 2008, letting customers follow the progress of their online order. Since then, it's upgraded its ordering system with a voice recognition feature powered by artificial intelligence to automate pizza orders made over the phone.

Domino's has also experimented with self-driving delivery service, teaming with Ford Motor for small-scale tests in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last August and a pilot program in Miami that also included Postmates delivery service. While much of the discussion about self-driving vehicles has focused on taxi service, automated delivery is expected to be a broader application of the technology, with McKinsey & Company predicting that 80% of all items — and soon perhaps pizza —  will be delivered autonomously in less than a decade.