Who would’ve thought the rats would look good in comparison?
Much as we enjoy the rollout of interesting new things to eat (sammies and torpedoes both rock) as well as any improvement to their overall store design and ordering process, we have to grudgingly point out that Quizno’s advertising still sucks.
Quizno’s creative went off the rails in 2000 with Cliff Freeman, when they decided a “bold, refreshing way” to sell food was to show people eating torn-up scraps of subs out of the trash and a dog’s mouth. Also, suckling a wolf’s teat.
Provocative, yes, and ridiculously funny at times. Which got attention. Which both agency and brand fell utterly in love with. Which produced nine more years (and counting) of creative that puts shock ahead of thoughtful brand building.
Cue the singing rats.
The most recognized work in Quizno’s vast arsenal of empty edgy is the spongmonkey campaign, which is funny oddball stuff. The spots, created by the ever-smart Martin Agency, got enormous attention for the emerging chain. It was polarizing. You either loved it or hated it, just like a certain prez o’ the time. (As a creative, I was a little put off by the directly lifted nature of the work, but that’s just being bitchy.)
But it was just weird for weird’s sake. Which, yes, got attention. More attention. More validation. More weird for weird.
We should point out Cliff won the business back in 2007, and actually created a few spots that sold the brand without resorting to cheap sex jokes or rats or gross-out tactics. But then they lost the account again.
Let’s jump forward to more recent history (because this screed is getting tedious, and we really don’t want to dip into the morass that is Baby Bob, who’s moved on to bigger, e*Tradier things). Yep. Moving on. To the Nitro Group and the talking sex oven that introduced the new torpedo sandwich by telling an employee to ”put it in me, Scott.” Just. Ah. Gah. Bravo, ad people. What makes me hungry is equating your sandwich with a penis that’s about to shoved into something. Hey! Think I can get two in my mouth at once?
Hopping over the gender line, we come to the Q Spot. And by Q Spot we mean G Spot (does anybody even talk like this anymore? Did we stumble into some kind of geo-specific time warp that transported us to the backlot of the late-70s porn industry?) In these horribly produced commercials, customers have character-specific orgasms upon first bite, complete with low-fi exploding Q Spot logos. “Give your Q Spot a licking”?? Maybe we’re just too damn Midwestern, but good lord.
These spots exist somewhere between the singing rats and the smarter work Freeman did for Sammies; it’s in bad taste, but it’s food-focused. Equals? Bad-tasting food.
Pushing even further into literal bad taste, there’s the latest scuttle over an online video, produced by Playboy and denied responsibility by Quizno’s. To us, it reeks of Quizno’s modus operandi: shock and get attention, taste be damned.
Maybe the appointment of Greg MacDonald as Quizno’s new president will solve this nagging inability to advertise in a way that isn’t borderline disgusting. Then again, according to that NRN article, MacDonald has been “involved in re-branding” as of late last year. So who knows.
Apologies to Marlin designer Q Brown. I guess you thought this post was about you? (Didn’t you? Didn’t you?)
NOTE:
More toasty torpedo promotions have just broken, and while they tend to still feature the purring sex oven, at least there’s no shoving in of proxy penises.
