New York - 10 February, 2004 -

What is it about sandwich shop chains that inspires Madison Avenue to present them in campaigns that are more self-consciously zany than a Noah's ark filled with animals from Super Bowl commercials? First, a year ago, Arby's, owned by the Triarc Companies, introduced a campaign by Doner in Southfield, Mich., centered on an animated oven mitt that spoke with the voice of the comedian Tom Arnold. Then, last fall, Subway Restaurants brought out a campaign, by Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis, part of the Publicis Groupe, showing adults misbehaving in outlandish ways like a man washing his car dressed as a cheerleader while his embarrassed wife cringed. Now, Quiznos Sub is introducing a campaign, by the Martin Agency in Richmond, owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies, centered on deliberately cheesy-looking and -acting characters. The critters - familiar to the fans of a comedic Web site, rathergood.com, as the Spongmonkeys - are brought to life with the lowest-tech animation this side of "Speed Racer" to sing the praises of Quiznos sandwiches in purposely off-key, out-of-sync voices. The primary reason for the off-kilter campaigns, analysts say, is to appeal directly to the consumers most likely to eat most often at fast-food sandwich shops, diners from 18 to 34. Those consumers respond favorably in surveys to marketers that run ads with tongue-in-cheek humor, signaling they do not take themselves too seriously. "One of our assistants," age around 24, "came in this morning raving about" the Quiznos campaign, Irma Zandl, president at the Zandl Group in New York, a research and trend consulting company focused on youth marketing, said yesterday. Younger consumers "consider this a particularly soft-sell, under-the-radar approach," Ms. Zandl said, referring to the Flash-animated characters in the Quiznos campaign. The campaign is the first work from Martin since the agency was awarded the Quiznos creative assignment, with spending estimated at $25 million to $30 million, last October. Martin succeeded Cliff Freeman & Partners in New York, which used a similar approach when it handled the account. Freeman's commercials showed humans acting like cartoon characters, including a chef who forgot to wear his pants to work and a hungry man raised by wolves. "What I think is happening here is that our friends in the sandwich category are feeling competitive pressure from the burger chains such as McDonald's and Wendy's," said Ron Paul, president at Technomic, a food-service consulting company in Chicago. The burger chains, he said, "have recently come back very strongly" with robust sales gains after a year or so of losing sales to the sandwich chains. As a result, "the sandwich chains aren't getting the growth they were hoping for," Mr. Paul said, "so there's more of a need to call attention to themselves." Quiznos has been one of the biggest recent success stories in the fast-food field, reaching second place in the sandwich segment behind only Subway, the trade publication Nation's Restaurant News reported. Quiznos has more than tripled its stores, to 2,500-plus from 838 in 2000, and more than doubled its United States sales, to $646 million from $270 million. "The business has been good for a long time, and Cliff Freeman was a great partner," said Trey Hall, chief marketing officer at Quiznos in Denver, "but it was time to try something new." "The philosophy we have here is when we have the ball we have to score, because we are up against competitors that have the ball a lot more than we do," Mr. Hall said, referring to Subway's ad budget, estimated at $225 million, seven to eight times the size of the Quiznos budget. "So the advertising we have needs to be noticed." In the commercials, the weird-looking Spongmonkeys appear on screen, superimposed over photographs of impossibly gorgeous food items known in the industry as beauty shots. The poorly drawn characters with their ill-fitting teeth, popping eyes and incongruous hats warble jingles that make the Oscar Mayer tune "My bologna has a first name{hellip}" sound like a Cole Porter verse. One jingle describes the sandwiches this way: "They are tasty. They are crunchy. They are warm because they toast them." The song ends with the characters observing that Quiznos offers customers "a pepper bar." In another commercial, the Spongmonkeys offer a dollar off sandwiches with a coupon, any kind of coupon, "for things to eat," they sing, "or oil changes, pony rides, or for hair plugs." Kerry Feuerman, vice chairman and group creative director at Martin, said the campaign demonstrated that Quiznos "is scrappy, and has to be, and on top of that, likes being scrappy." "The characters are sort of 'take us as we are' kind of guys," he added, "evangelists for the brand whose enthusiasm is infectious." And as madcap as the Spongmonkeys are, Mr. Feuerman said, "this is classic testimonial advertising" because the characters "come out and talk about" the product as proxies for the "consumers who love the product." "Don't anybody be fooled; this is retail advertising," he added. "We don't ignore the product; we don't ignore the offer." The offbeat but hard-working nature of the campaign enables the strange-looking characters to sing the praises of Quiznos - figuratively and literally - in a way that charmed even Bob Garfield, the normally skeptical ad critic of the trade publication Advertising Age. In a review this week, Mr. Garfield gave the campaign three and a half stars (out of four) for its ability to "break through the clutter as few ads ever have." He also praised the jingles for being "not only catchy, in a perverse please-make-it-stop sort of way" but also providing "a clear iteration of the product benefits." "Say what you will about what the guys look like," Mr. Feuerman said of the Spongmonkeys. "If sales for subs at Quiznos go up, these guys will make Sophia Loren look ugly."

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