How a 425 lb. consumer insight turned to gold

By Richard M. Coad
Executive Creative Director
MDB Communications, Inc.

A few years ago‚ a Subway television commercial ran for the first time featuring a previously overweight college student named Jared. It not only changed the eating habits and fast food preferences of millions of people, but it wrote a new page in the history of quick service restaurants.

At the time I was the Executive Creative Director for the Publicis Groupe in Chicago, which served as the national advertising agency for Subway. When I began working on the account, sales were in a downward spiral and it was time to radically rethink the advertising strategy.

My first instinct as a newcomer was to latch onto the low fat message. It seemed like a much more intriguing thing to talk about than anything else, and it seemed like it had a creatively rich future. But when I began talking it up around the agency, I heard all about how they’d explored it thoroughly over the years and, frankly, had achieved boardroom wear out.

Instinct Over Intellect
I pursued a low fat strategy anyway and was encouraged by three pieces of information. The first was some research data on eating habits that seems obvious now but wasn’t then. It made it clear that many people who ate fast food on a regular basis were overweight. Furthermore, of those interviewed, ninety percent said they wanted to lose weight and had tried more than three times to do so but failed. They also said they planned to keep eating fast food anyway because they liked the way it tasted. The second piece of information, or insight, came from studying Subway sales over the previous years. The only period that had a consistent jump in sales year after year occurred in January and February. This period, of course, happened to coincide with the time of year people decide to get in shape, and Subway already knew this. But I also thought the world was changing. People were no longer just conscious of their weight in January when they turned over a new leaf, but always. For Subway, a low fat company, I didn’t think their opportunity was simply a low fat month or two. I began to think their real opportunity was for a low fat year. And a low fat future. If you think about it, what other quick service restaurant had the credibility to do that?

The Revelation
The real revelation came for me when we connected several words that had never been connected before. Subway made low fat sandwiches. Why did people eat low fat sandwiches? Well, they were watching their weight. Watching your weight is another way of saying you’re on a diet. If Subway equaled low fat, and low fat equaled diet, what if Subway, a fast food restaurant, equaled diet? Could there possibly be a Subway diet? No one had made such a connection before. I wondered if this could be Subway’s place in the world.

Could Subway, the brand, actually stand for something no other fast food restaurant had? Could it represent HOPE for all those people who wanted to eat healthier and lose weight but didn’t want to give up fast food?

Looking for the Big Man
As with many desperate creative thinkers in advertising, I found myself in the magazine section of the local Barnes and Noble bookstore and began scanning the huge health and beauty section. After several hours I stumbled across the latest Men’s Health magazine. As I leafed through the pages, one article caught my eye: Stupid Men, Stupid Diets. One of the diets featured a college student who had weighed an incredible 425 pounds. Supposedly, he’d gone on a diet of Subway sandwiches for a year, losing an incredible 245 pounds. No name was given, but it allegedly had all happened at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. I quickly dispatched an intern on a trip to Bloomington, in search of the anonymous dieter.

The next morning, the intern called from Bloomington. He’d tracked down the student who’d lost the weight, said his name was Jared and that he was “cool.” He handed over the phone. That was my first conversation with Jared Fogle, and the rest is, as they say, history.

The Phenomenon Begins
Our first Subway commercial featuring Jared began on a Sunday and ran locally in Chicago. That Monday, the phenomenon began. Subway restaurants experienced something they’d never experienced before: there were people standing in lines to get in. By the end of the first week, the Chicago Subway franchise network had experienced a 40% increase in same store sales. This news traveled like wildfire to other franchise networks throughout the system and they began airing the spot. They, too, experienced a 40% increase in same store sales. After two weeks Jared’s story became the national ad campaign. Almost immediately, Subway experienced another gift. That one television commercial went viral in the media, and made Jared a pop culture icon. When people ask me why I think it worked so well, I say that it satisfied a consumer need in a new and unexpected way. People want to be healthier. But they don’t want to eat things that taste like they’re healthy. And if this guy lost all that weight eating Subway sandwiches, it seemed like an easy thing for anyone to do – a diet without sacrifice. Also, there was an absolutely absurd “before and after” demonstration that no one had seen before. And between the two extremes, there was a vast ocean of 245 pounds, and a Subway sandwich served as the bridge from one extreme to another.

Finally, the story was presented in such a way that it offered the one thing no other fast food restaurant could. It gave people hope, and perhaps that’s the biggest reason it worked so well then, and has carried Subway forward to this day.

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