14/04/2014
NEWS STORY
American sandwich chain Subway is considering signing a revolutionary sponsorship deal with Formula One which could see it partner with several teams as well as the sport itself according to an article in the Daily Telegraph by Christian Sylt.
Subway launched in the United States in 1965 but its prominence in Europe has been accelerating in recent years. In the United Kingdom and Ireland alone it has 1,731 stores making it Subway's biggest market outside the US. In January it announced that it wants to grow to 3,000 stores in the UK and Ireland by 2020 which would give it far more than rivals such as McDonald's and Greggs. A sponsorship in F1 would help to drive its exposure and make the most of this growth.
Subway's sponsorship strategy centres on athletes such as English boxer Anthony Ogogo and Holly Bleasdale, who holds the British pole vault record. Zak Brown, chief executive of JMI which handles Subway's motorsport sponsorship, says that F1 would be the "perfect" fit.
"I took the Subway Chief Marketing Officer to meet Bernie in Montreal last year, and I would say they have been exploring it for a year," says Brown. "They are all about the consumer, they are massive media buyers so they would look at a sport and see if it stacks up from a media point of view and Formula One does."
Subway is JMI's oldest client and first worked with it in 2002. JMI is responsible for bringing Subway to F1's American rival NASCAR, where it sponsors a team, a driver and a race. Brown says it is likely Subway would follow the same model in F1.
"It is not rocket science but people just haven't done it," he says. "If you look at their NASCAR strategy, they sponsor a team, an event and a driver but they use the driver as the centrepiece so I can see Subway being a global partner of F1 as well as sponsoring four to six drivers in different teams and using them collectively."
So you could imagine, and it would be quite ground-breaking for F1, a clever advertisement of Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel going into a Subway and racing to get there. When was the last time you saw Alonso, Vettel and Lewis Hamilton in a television commercial? It has never been done."
F1 is not renowned for having the most impressive TV adverts so this could make quite a splash. Back in the 1990s Murray Walker and Damon Hill took part in a famous ad for Pizza Hut but things have been downhill since then. Noteworthy recent efforts include a FIAT commercial featuring a badly dubbed Alonso and a cringe-worthy Santander campaign involving Jenson Button mysteriously popping up in someone's house.
Getting multiple sports stars to promote a single brand is a growing trend with the most recent example being TV ads for Turkish Airlines which show footballer Lionel Messi and basketball player Kobe Bryant travelling together.
Sponsoring several teams along with F1 itself would have a high-octane price tag. The cost of a global partnership of F1 alone rises to more than £17.9m ($30m) annually with team agreements required in addition to that. Nevertheless, Subway has adequate resources at its disposal as it reportedly had revenue of £10.9m ($18.2bn) in 2012. With that kind of money flowing in Subway could indeed be the perfect partner for F1.