Background
A STALE SITUATION
Moving into 2021, the Subway business was stale. Traffic and sales were at a 7-year low, the press was questioning the quality of our ingredients and fast casual restaurants were cutting into the entire fast food category. With losses mounting and traffic down, they needed to jumpstart the brand’s relevance.
BIGGEST REFRESH EVER
To address this, Subway overhauled the brand by introducing new and improved ingredients, new sandwiches, and even updating the packaging and in-store experience. With so much new, it was the largest refresh in Subway’s 60-year history.
But of all the improvements, the biggest was their new bread recipes including artisan italian, hearty multigrain and a low-carb bread. Painstakingly created by a panel of world-class bakers over three years, we knew we needed to do more than just announce the bread was better, we had to prove it in a surprising way.
Creative Idea:
SO MUCH NEW WE COULDN’T FIT IT ALL IN
There is so much new at Subway, we couldn’t fit it all in one ad. We kept running out of time, and yet we still had more to talk about. So we got creative and blurred the lines of reality to show the brand refresh seeping into the real world.
To do this, we created anthemic television ads featuring the biggest names in sports. But when they couldn’t fit it all in – we sought out more time anywhere, and on any screen we could. We accomplished this by buying airtime no one ever had before - in commercials for other brands, in influencer content, in show promos, even in the weather report on gas station TVs.
Strategy:
REIGNITE LATENT LOVE
While Subway is a brand committed to constant improvement, we had lost our momentum with consumers. In order to shift perception, we needed to tell consumers about the multitude of updates Subway made to the ingredients, the sandwiches, and even the customer experience.
As a better choice in the QSR category, Subway had a long history of working with athletes who were known for making better choices. These athletes are also the embodiment of constant improvement.
It was time to reignite the latent love – and with “So Much New”, we needed to partner with the most influential and trusted athletes to tell people about our fresh new ingredients and kick off the series of ongoing brand improvements the brand was making. Starting with one of the biggest improvements – the bread.
Execution
TOM BREADY
To prove Subway’s bread was fundamentally new and improved, we got Tom Brady – a man famous for not eating bread – to endorse it. So we borrowed time in Brady’s cologne ad. The “Bready” cologne ad launched during the 2021 NFL Season Opener, while Tom was playing.
“Bready” began like normal, black and white, whispery VO and a tuxedoed Brady. But then he announced that this was actually an ad for Subway and talked about their seductive, new multigrain bread. At that point, Tom Brady declared, “Smells so good, I can almost taste it.”
But this was about shifting perception so we needed to prove our bread wasn’t just better, but Brady approved. We went a step further, partnering with Hero Bread to develop a bread Brady would eat. Culminating with Brady releasing a video of him not only tasting it, but chomping down on a footlong.
Outcome:
Brady endorsing and eating bread stunned NFL fans. Immediately #Subway’s Bready was trending nationally on Twitter, driving nearly 25,000 tweets after launch during the NFL Season Opener - which in turn led to hundreds of pieces of media coverage. This led to a mutually beneficial spike in PR coverage driven by Subway announcing its partnership with Hero Bread of which Tom Brady is an investor.
The success of the entire Refresh campaign has been unprecedented within Subway. Over the course of the campaign, the Refresh campaign garnered a total of over 3 Billion earned media impressions across 3,000 pieces of media coverage. Within the first full month Subway was already exceeding weekly sales records (and that sales impact continued to climb throughout the year).
