Biography|Russell J. Weiner — The Prairie House Week the Pizza Turnaround Went on Air

The campaign that remade Domino's did not start on a soundstage.

It started in this office park, after a year of recipe tests, and it went on air in the last week of 2009.

The Prairie House at Domino's Farms, 24 Frank Lloyd Wright Drive in Ann Arbor Charter Township, is the public headquarters Weiner had entered as chief marketing officer in September 2008.

The new pizza reached stores nationwide on 27 December 2009.

Television spots and a four-minute online documentary titled Pizza Turnaround followed on 28 December, made with Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

The spots put real focus-group complaints on screen and showed company people watching them.

Forbes, writing that same week, put the media spend at $75 million.

Weiner did not invent the new crust.

He insisted the company say in public why the old one had to go.

Patrick Doyle, then president of Domino's USA, later told the Ann Arbor Observer that Weiner had proposed admitting the problem in the ads after the recipe work was already underway.

Domestic same-store sales rose 14.3 percent in the first quarter of 2010, the company told the SEC, the largest quarterly domestic gain since the 2004 IPO.

Stand at Lobby F and the long brick groundscraper is the building from which that week was dated.

The photograph shows the Domino's-marked public entrance, taken in 2012.

The pin is the public lobby, not a private floor.

Photo: Dwight Burdette, 8 December 2012, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons