Make sandwiches, not war.

In September 2021, the biggest news story was Australia's $90 billion deal with the USA and UK for nuclear submarines, called AUKUS. It enraged the French government who lost out on the deal. And it enraged the Australian public with so much money being spent on submarines.

This deal was giving subs a bad name. So Subway decided to do something about it. We needed to change sentiment around subs quickly.

Our target audience is essentially anyone with a mouth.

But we know from research, QSR customers are always looking for three things: good value, taste and convenience.

Our approach to turn a large-scale news story into an affordability and cost-of-living message was always going to resonate with our value-seeking audience.

We utilised a hero sub to quickly turn politics into a tasty story.

And when the news stories were inundated with the 30-year timeframe of the construction of the nuclear subs, it was an easy win to talk about our immediate, fast delivery message.

Within 4 hours of the news story breaking, we turned around a full-page print campaign across all major mastheads in the country – selling our much cheaper, much tastier, less nuclear subs.

This 4 hours included: selling the idea, creating the assets, briefing media suppliers, getting regulatory approval from Subway HQ, and dispatching media elements.

We used print as our solo seed media, knowing and expecting the message would resonate enough to get shared organically on social media.

We used all five main mastheads in Australia over one weekend to generate the road-blocking effect needed to create a socially-shared message.

Over half a billion viral impressions in just three days (seen over 533 million times)

Over $3.7 million AUD in earned viral reach (at a modest $5 USD CPM).

Sources: Netbase 2021, Statista (average global twitter spend for CPM) 2021