Why you never heard of McPizza.

Oh, they tried. The McDonald’s guys had it all figured out. After two years in the test kitchen, they had settled on a menu of three 14-inch pizzas—a cheese, a pepperoni, and a sausage-onion-green pepper.

“No plain sausage ?” we asked.

“Nah,” said the guys, “We don’t need a plain sausage.”

So we went to work. We did a photo shoot with all three pizzas, individually and together. We produced the translights for the menu board and drive-thru lane. We created the rollout campaign and couponing program, and then showed it all to the pizza guys.

“Yeah,” they said. “We need a plain sausage.”

So we did it again. This time we got the okay, and moved on to the soft launch in Evansville, Indiana, where they had installed a full-sized pizza oven, a full stainless steel prep line and a shiny new crew of trained pizza kids. Things went great for the first 10 minutes, until they discovered that the 14-inch pizzas wouldn’t fit through the 10-inch drive-thru window.

McDonald’s Pizza disappeared without a trace. As did the pizza guys.