Subway brands with a smile and a bite - advertising supplement - On Cable

Brandweek, April 13, 1998

At ad agency Hal Riney & Partners, staffers joke about two pictures hanging on their office wall: one is a great big smile and the other is of Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield's car. Ploy represent the essence of the agency's "Smile and Bite" campaign for Subway.

The successful campaign boosted awareness of the Subway brand substantially with a creative approach that combined air upbeat image campaign with aggressive comparisons to Subway competitors. Its unanticipated star, however, was cable TV.

There's a lot to smile about these days at Subway, the fastest growing fast food franchise and the only one that's experienced real growth during the past few years. Success was not without concerns, however, and Subway marketers knew theirs was a lack of strong product identification. McDonald's had its Big Mac and clown and Burger King had its Whopper, but Subway had neither sandwich nor style that distinguished it from the rest of the industry.

Subway turned to Hal Piney in part because of its legendary reputation for branding. It; had transformed Gallo wines' image from comic to sophisticated in the 1980's and it had created the mystique of the Saturn automobile in the 1990's.

For Subway, the agency set up an umbrella, "Smile and Bite" strategy. "It's basically two campaigns that work together," explains Doug Seay, senior vice president at Hal Riney.

Smile is a branding campaign designed to promote long-term sales and build Subway's image. Bite is a short-term sales or promotion-driven campaign that's more aggressive. It often addresses the competition's vulnerabilities and offers Subway as the positive solution.

What really made Smile and Bite work, however, was Piney's use of cable TV, Seay says. Prior to this campaign, the agency had used cable more as a complimentary medium, rarely putting more than 20 percent of a TV budget into the medium. "We always recognized the value of cable," Seay says. "After all, a third of TV's audience is watching cable during primetime. But we never thought of cable's segmented nature as a strength until we began executing the S & B campaign two years ago.

"When the smile campaign rolled out on Nick-at-Nite, we were surprised at how the flow from show to commercial and back to show seemed so natural," Seay continues. "We became aware, that we could compartmentalize our message with our market. We had a medium where we could target the right audience with the right message with laserlike accuracy. The Smile commercials, like Subway's "Ingredients," worked with any Nick-at-Nite show or, for greater reach, with any of the family shows on Turner and USA."

In "Ingredients," Subway presents the people who grow food surrounded by scenes from America's heartland and the gently measured intonations: `It's the way the sun makes things grow. It's the way bread begins as an ocean of wheat. It's the way we make over a million people their sandwiches every day."

The Bite commercials are 15- or 30-second up-tempo spots like Runner, in which a slightly rotund junior executive races out of an office building and sprints across town, passing marathon runners all the way, in order to bum up the fat calories he's about to consume with his burger. As he runs, a voiceover compares the 30 grams of fat in a Big Mac or a Whopper with the six grams of fat available in seven of Subway's sandwiches. " If you want to counteract the effects of a fat-filled lunch," the commercial says, "choose the burger joint furthest from you and run there. Or choose Subway."

Riney's pairing of the upbeat Smile with the stinging Bite enabled the campaign to overcome consumers' general dislike of comparative advertising, Seay says. "When you tie comparative advertising to a positive image campaign, it works."

The combination also quadrupled awareness over that achieved by Subway's previous, promotion-only campaign. "The campaign is effective for a number of reasons," Seay says, "but there's a dynamic that happens when you tell an audience how nice you are and then hit them hard with competitive advertising. It's very effective."

The Runner and spots like it aired on ESPN, Turner Sports and Comedy Central. "There's nothing better than running those grams-of-fat commercials in the middle of ESPN's triathlons," Seay says. "The people watching know you have to be healthy. It's really synergistic with the message."

Kevin Armstrong, marketing director at Subway, adds that the two-pronged campaign gave the fast food chain a new level of flexibility in its advertising. "Smile and Bite addresses the reality of the fast food business: being friendly and aggressive," he says.

It also enables Subway to react quickly when competitors roll out new campaigns. "With S & B, you don't have to reinvent the wheel," says Armstrong. "If research shows the need for comparative ads, they are already in your arsenal. If you need more smile, you already have them too. And we have the networks that can deliver the message. For example, if we need a more female audience, we can increase our frequency with VH1 or if we need more reach, either S or B will work with Turner and USA networks."