Christopher Thomas-Moore (CTM), senior vice president and chief digital officer at Domino’s Pizza, spoke to a packed room of restaurant technologists during MURTEC 2025 as the event’s opening keynote. During his presentation, CTM discussed the many ways Domino’s has innovated over the last 10 years, including: the Domino’s Pizza Tracker, a car designed solely to deliver pizzas while keeping them piping hot, the first iteration of its AnyWare offering that allowed customers to order a pizza simply by texting an emoji, the launch of its first autonomous vehicle in partnership with Ford (back in 2017!), Pinpoint Delivery, and in-vehicle pizza ordering via Apple CarPlay.
So what has allowed Domino’s to be so effective with its digital innovations?
According to CTM, it’s about ensuring these innovations are relevant to customers.
“Are you speaking to your customers about things they actually care about?” he asked the audience.
For example, its Pizza Tracker addressed consumer concerns about where their pizza was and when it would be delivered. They didn’t want to hop in the shower only to have the pizza show up at their door five minutes later. The AnyWare feature addressed consumer pain points regarding the time it takes to order a pizza via phone, mobile app, or website, creating a faster, easier checkout process. And its Pinpoint Delivery system allowed for delivery to where the customer was—a park, a beach, a campsite, etc.—rather than forcing them to be at home just to get a pizza.
Domino’s, however, not only learns what tensions are important to fix for its customers, but it also looks at how current social and economic conditions are affecting them and what is happening within its category as a whole.
“Sometimes there isn’t a tension that crosses all three categories, but when you find that one commonality that does—that’s where the magic happens,” CTM said.
CTM gave a specific example of when Domino’s found this magic with the launch of its Emergency Pizza promotion. In 2023, the company realized that high inflation rates meant customers had less disposable income, making meal planning challenging. For more than a decade, Domino’s has had a reputation for providing good value.
“Instead of telling people we were going to provide a BOGO promotion, we came up with a more creative wrapper for this bounce back promotion and found that it really resonated with customers,” he explained.
In 2024, the brand decided to bring the campaign back but knew it had to find a way to refresh it. So it partnered with gaming platforms to add emergency pizzas as power-ups for energy boosts when a player was dying in a game. It also partnered with Netflix to create a Squid Game commercial that tied into a highly relevant pop culture moment.
At the end of his presentation, CTM shared the seven basic tenets that guide all of Domino’s innovative thinking:
- Embrace revolution. Early adopters blaze the trail for something new, and when you embrace the revolution, you can more easily stay on top of what’s to come.
- Practice uncommon honesty. When you are real with your customers, they appreciate it. Domino’s ran an entire advertising campaign admitting its pizza didn’t taste good, telling customers it had heard their feedback and was changing the recipe. The campaign resonated, and when the new recipe debuted, profits were—literally—off the charts.
- Define your why. Don’t do something just because everyone else is doing it. Really understand the thought process and innovation behind the tech and know why you should lean into it.
- Take bold action. Always be willing to be the first!
- Challenge everything. Understand why your brand does things a certain way and then find ways to challenge those customs. Sometimes we do things just because they’ve always been done that way, but that doesn’t mean they still work.
- Get innovation-ready. Domino’s organizational structure ensures that department heads have peers from other departments who are teammates and expected to talk to each other and work together on common goals. Can your organization restructure itself to make something similar possible?
- Innovation is advertising. We’re always a work in progress. We’re never going to be done. We’re always building on it for the future.
