Subway 2023
A year of sandwiches on the brain.
For many, 2023 was the year of King Charles’s coronation. For others, it was Barbenheimer. For me, it was sandwiches. For that was the year I stepped in as Creative Director for Subway across the UK and EMEA. As it happened, I had arrived at a pivotal moment in sandwich history. After 56 years, Subway was about to do something radical: introduce a menu.
No, seriously. The new Series Menu was a pretty big change-up for a chain famous for its anything-goes philosophy. Until then, ordering a Footlong had been less a transaction than a tiny act of self-expression. Many loyal fans cherished the freedom to fill their 12 inches of bread with whatever they damn well pleased.
But now Subway was pushing fifteen preordained sandwich combinations. Research showed that not everyone was happy about it. For some, it offered welcome simplicity. But for others, it sounded dangerously close to sandwich authoritarianism.
With a potential sandwich uprising on our hands, we needed a way to introduce the Series Menu while making it perfectly clear that nobody’s sandwich sovereignty was under threat.
So rather than pretending the great sandwich divide didn’t exist, we leaned into it. “Two Ways to Subway” playfully pitted Subway’s two ordering tribes against each other: those ready to trust the menu, and those who still believed the only true sub was one of their own making.
A big OOH campaign followed, heroing some of the Series Menu’s standout creations while making the case for a bigger, better lunch.
This was followed by another campaign proclaiming that lunches don’t come any bigger or better than a Footlong. Superior in size and packed with flavour, it promised a more satisfying feed in every sense.
Meanwhile, Subway signed up as the official sponsor of two of TV’s biggest reality shows: Love Island and the returning Big Brother. Naturally, we treated this as an opportunity to introduce the new subs to an audience already hooked on coupling up, resisting temptation and the fine art of the reality-TV soundbite.
As if the year hadn’t already asked enough of Europe’s sandwich community, Subway also launched a brand new loyalty programme. This time, customers could earn Subway Cash every time they bought something, then spend it across the whole menu on whatever they wanted.
A suspiciously straightforward proposition, really. But we fixed that.
Finally, Halloween gave us the perfect excuse to get a little weird. It also gave us a chance to experiment with some AI technology, as was obligatory in 2023.
As the nights drew in, we turned our attention to Subway’s hot-pressed SubMelts: deliciously melty, deeply cheesy and exactly the sort of thing you might be tempted to order after dark.
But at your peril. Because SubMelts were also the perfect trigger for that well-known phenomenon, cheese dreams. So, naturally, we did the responsible thing and made a cautionary film about the potentially surreal side effects of indulging in an ultra-cheesy late-night feast.
Based on real cheese dreams crowdsourced via Subway and Uber Eats’ social channels, the films used AI to bring those unsettling visions to life in all their uncanny glory.
Launched in the lead-up to Halloween, the campaign was paired with a 20% Uber Eats promotion available only after dark, daring customers to awaken their own freaky nightmares.