Our agency and Philadelphia created a campaign that used online and offline techniques to create Italy’s favourite sandwich, voted for by Italy’s social community – ‘The Social Sandwich’!

The campaign introduced Philadelphia to Italian food lovers as a key ingredient in their lunch in a fun and creative way, using social media to raise awareness of the spread and encourage people to get involved with, try out and interact with Philadelphia.

By bringing together social media, in-store activity, blogger engagement and other marketing techniques, we created a campaign that got the whole nation excited about how they could use Philadelphia as part of their lunch.

Philadelphia’s community was invited to try the sandwiches in bars and coffee shops bearing ‘The Social Sandwich’ branding. Having tasted the sandwiches, customers were encouraged to spread the good news across social networks voting for their favourite either at www.thesocialsandwich.it, or the Philadelphia Facebook page.

We didn’t choose any old restaurants either, each was hand picked, taking into consideration their popularity on Facebook, Foursquare and Google Places.

Throughout the campaign, users checked in leaving tips and comments as well as receiving reminders to try the other sandwiches.

On Twitter, #thesocialsandwich allowed users to follow the judges, the votes, and the tweets from the bloggers who naturally were following the campaign very closely!

After 50 days voting the “Social Sandwich” was elected! 'La Forza’ reigned king. Made of course with Philadelphia, fresh basil, turkey, romaine lettuce, olive oil, salt & pepper, in a crunchy baguette, making a pretty mouth watering meal.

Over the 50 days, a massive 5,000 sandwiches were served by the snack bars and restaurants involved in the project and 10,500 votes were submitted!

Over 700 tweets included the hashtag #thesocialsandwich and more than 500,000 Twitter users were involved in the fun. Facebook users and influencers even created three of their own fan pages as a result of the tense competition!

The campaign also led to huge growth for Philadelphia’s Facebook page - during the contest, its Facebook community grew by as many as 90,000 users.

All of the main marketing blogs got involved, generating lots of great content about Philadelphia and its fantastic sandwich potential. All in all, a huge success.