Subway Turns to TikTok to Take Toasted Bites toYoung aAudience with New Campaign Created by Above+Beyond

Mar. 09, 2020

Subway is launching a campaign for its Toasted Bites range – three inch, square ciabatta bread rolls with a variety of filling options – specifically targeting the 16-24 age group with mobile and digital advertising activity.

With a youth audience who are harder than ever to reach, engage with media only on their own terms and without any platform loyalty, Above+Beyond needed to spread awareness of the product and cement Subway as a brand for this audience.

Invading the internet, the campaign appears across all relevant online spaces, with a super-simple, hyper-entertaining audio/visual ‘hook’, that’s purposefully catchy and impossible to get out of your head. It’s one word, BITES.

Given the audience’s dislike of overt brand messaging, the weird and wonderful animated content has been created in a tone and energy that reflects their internet content consumption habits. Everything from short-form un-skippable Instagram and Snapchat Stories, Spotify partnerships and Snapchat lenses to Bites messages via YouTube influencers, TikTok challenges and Twitch partnerships. All delivered in a way that is irresistible to the eye and the ear and screams flavour.

Every touchpoint is purposefully bite-sized, so it doesn’t pull users away from their regular content, but is disruptive and repetitive to keep Subway top of mind. This approach allows the campaign to be high-frequency and hyper-targeted, with a wealth of unique assets existing only in environments native to the target audience.

Running across the UK and Ireland, Above+Beyond has also created cinema, digital Out-of-Home and radio executions. On the big screen in cinemas, bite-sized spots lasting only a few seconds will shout “BITES” at cinema goers, working alongside 90-second ads made for the movies.

David Billing, Chief Creative Officer at Above+Beyond said:

"This is advertising, but not as we know it. It’s not about a classic line or refined art direction, it’s about wonky disruptive content that lives on the internet, in the moment, purposefully made to be disposable. In Private Island we have a brilliant creative partner who has helped us bring these nano-episodes to life – we can’t wait to see them take over the web and beyond.”

 

Angie Gosal, Head of Marketing at Subway said:

“We’ve spent the last nine months celebrating Subway’s unique customisation offering to our mass market. The targeted launch campaign for this innovative new product range opens up the brand to a youth market that we haven’t yet engaged, and we’re very excited to see how the brand can communicate on this audience’s terms.”