Domino’s wants you to know their pizza sucks. It’s not just ordinary or overpriced. It’s pretty darn lousy. And it’s been that way for a long, long time. But they’ve seen the error in their ways. And they want you to love them for admitting it.

You’ve seen the commercials. Domino’s filmed people in focus groups trashing the taste of their product and edited those scenes with scenes of proud Domino’s chefs vowing improvement. The spots culminate with a Publisher’s-Clearinghouse-style visit to the unsuspecting focus group members who are given the opportunity to chow down on the improved Domino’s pizza. Not surprisingly they’re happy to eat both the pizza and their words.

You have to give Domino’s points for trying something different. Bringing up what’s wrong with a product is the third rail of advertising. Generally when companies realize their products or services aren’t up to par, they fix them and then advertise them as new and improved. They accentuate the positive without bringing up the negative that necessitated the improvement.

You can look at that conventional approach as a kind of dishonesty or as a kind of extension of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. I look at as a practical response to what people want from advertising, which is information they can use moving forward to make a purchase decision. Certainly there are extraordinary circumstances where candor for a company’s grossly irresponsible behavior is appropriate in its advertising. Personally, I’ll never pay attention to another commercial for the big financial institutions that took government bailout money and then lavished their employees with huge bonuses until I get an apology. When you’ve really, really screwed up you need to admit it before launching into your sales spiel. (It also helps if you stop doing the bad thing.) But I wonder how much anyone really feels betrayed by Domino’s because their crust tastes like cardboard.

Focus groups like the ones in the Domino’s commercial almost always produce the kinds of results you see in those spots. If you bring ten or so people together in a room to ask their opinions about anything, at least one or two will hate it and relish the opportunity to tell you so. I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t the first time Domino’s got the thumbs down on their pizza. It’s just the first time they decided to make a commercial out of it.

I suspect that we’re going to see a lot more of this mea culpa advertising in the months to come. Advertisers sense—not incorrectly, I think—that people are fed up with the enormous incompetence and avoidance or responsibility that has been exhibited by some players in business and/or the government (depending on your politics). There’s a pizza-sized hunger for somebody to take responsibility for something.