Subway's You are the Chef

What is this?

Target customers when they enter other competitors’ restaurants. SubWay launched a smartphone-only campaign to reach consumers in the vicinities of its establishment.

30 days prior to the campaign, Subway collected anonymous device IDs at restaurant locations of four different competitors around France. Among those IDs, a target group for the campaign was identified.

During the campaign, users within the group saw the campaign only if they were within 400 meters of a Subway restaurant or one of the selected four competitor restaurants

While seeing Subway’s campaign video, each user could see the actual distance to a nearby Subway restaurant form their real-time location. Converted users could click on a call-to-action that led them into the native map application in their mobile with a store locator and travel itinerary.

Why is it interesting?

The campaign is a great example of how to leverage on anonymous user IDs without violating any personal data directives. At the same time, the CTA of the campaign allowed to obtain the exact location without having them allowing geolocation on their device. Such an insight could be useful for further development of other campaigns.

Eventually, the campaign resulted in more than a 30% increase of the targeted store visits, together with a click-through-rate of 4.26%, an impressive rate when compared to an industry benchmark of 1.6%. Finally, the comparison of the total users exposed to the campaign versus users not exposed showed an impressive 46.72% uplift of visits to Subway restaurants all across France.