As the agency for Quiznos, Windowseat has created an impressive collection of buzz worthy
content for the brand’s Toasty.TV platform. In particular, our successful series of original
parody videos—lampooning some of the biggest names in pop culture—has helped us reach
over 15 MM views on YouTube and amassed over 23 million minutes spent with the brand online.
In 2014, Quiznos was approached by executives at 20th Century Fox regarding the parody video
we created called Waze Runner—a play on the first installment of their Maze Runner movie
franchise. They were interested in a collaboration with the brand to help raise awareness of the
next installment of the young adult film franchise and ensure millennials showed up at the box
office for the fall release of the second film Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials.
Windowseat developed a promotion to support the sequel video parody, along with a social media
rollout and in-store sweepstakes that promoted their new spicy limited time offer sandwich called
the “Satisfire” Ciabatta.
In less than a week of its release, the new parody video hit 1 million views on YouTube; and by the
end of the second week of its release the video had more than doubled its views to over 2.6 million.
Overall traffic for the Toasty.TV site increased by 35k, and subscribers to Quiznos YouTube channel
rose by 32%. All of this fueled by a flurry of publicity in over 300 media outlets like Playboy, WSJ,
Fortune, Creativity and more.
Adweek online specifically took notice about the company’s approach with branded content.
Chris Ruszowski, VP of Marketing Quiznos said, “we believe in creating content marketing that
will live on, that is relevant and has a place on Toasty.TV. We feel that content marketing is different
than feature investment marketing. We don’t ever try and promote a new sandwich, it’s more about
having a relevant conversation with our target audience.”
Tim Kraus, Director of Interactive at Quiznos was also asked by Entrepreneur Magazine about their
strategy and added, “we want to make sure wherever our audience is going, that’s where we have
to go.” He continued, “so if they switch to consuming video content on their mobile device, or their
tablet or their desktop computer, that’s where we have to be as a brand.”
In its first weekend, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials grossed $30.3 million at the box office,
beating out Johnny Depp’s Black Mass for the number 1 film of the weekend. If that isn’t a
Hollywood ending then we don’t know what is.
Check out the behind-the-scenes interviews with executives from the studio, client and agency
about the value of content marketing in reaching young adults.
