How Dentsu Creative Canada and Subway Canada turned a Windsor map quirk into a National Sandwich Day campaign, with creators first and paid media kept local.
Sandwich Town is a historic neighbourhood in Windsor, Ont., without a single sandwich shop inside its boundaries. The closest Subway sits just outside the line. Dentsu Creative Canada turned that gap into SubDistricting, a campaign in which the Sandwich Town BIA asked Google Maps to redraw the neighbourhood’s boundaries to take in the restaurant. It ended with free subs for residents on National Sandwich Day, November 3.
It started with a hallway conversation in the spring, when Karl Ouellette, a creative director in the agency’s Montreal office, pointed out the quirk to Dimitra Georgakis, President and Chief Client Officer of Dentsu Creative Canada. Ouellette and Dentsu’s Group Creative Director Kyla Galloway later developed it into a campaign. For Georgakis, what lifted it above a one-off joke was the chance to give Subway “an actionable way” to show up for the community.
The campaign went public on October 26 with a town hall-style video posted through creator accounts, not Subway’s own channels. “We led with creators because we understood that the campaign was contingent on conversation before it could be dependent on branding,” Georgakis said. The team’s reasoning was that an announcement about redrawing a neighbourhood’s borders would spark more curiosity and sharing if people came across it through creators instead of traditional advertising.
The team started with a Windsor-based business owner and resident to give the story local credibility, then added a mix of lifestyle publisher accounts and more traditional creators to carry it nationally. Creators were encouraged to react in their own way instead of following a script.
Paid media had a much smaller footprint. Local digital out-of-home ads teased that Subway was “working on it,” followed by neighbourhood-targeted social and outdoor ads inviting residents to celebrate on November 3, when anyone with proof of Sandwich Town residence could pick up a free six-inch Cold Cut Combo. Georgakis said the paid social and out-of-home support was deliberately limited to Sandwich Town and the Windsor area.
Subway Canada has nearly 3,000 locations, and Denny Downie, the company’s Interim Managing Director, said the goal was to turn National Sandwich Day into a local cultural moment that could spark conversation “well beyond one neighbourhood.” The brand is measuring success through earned media coverage and impressions, social reach and engagement, influencer performance, video views, sentiment and share of conversation. It hasn’t shared results yet.
The map itself is out of Subway’s hands. The BIA submitted the boundary request to Google on its own, and Downie said any response would be between Google and the BIA. “For us, the success of the campaign was never dependent on the outcome of the request itself,” he said.
Credits: Creative and strategy, Dentsu Creative Canada. Media, Carat. Production, Dentsu Creative Canada. Influencer and public relations, Veritas Communications. Social media, Gale.
