Guide to Fan-First, Brand-Second Marketing with Dan Salkey and Dean Harrison | Ep. 335

0:01Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. we're back with another episode of the marketing millennials i have two people on the podcast i know you normally hear one person but we have two people on the podcast today dan and dean dan i know you said we must have dean on this podcast so um i'll let you do the intro for dean um but i'm excited to chat to you both yeah thank you very much dan from one down down to another um yeah i mean just briefly before before i introduce dean you're probably wondering who is this uh weird english doppelganger of daniel murray here um i'm dan salki i'm the founder and strategy partner at an agency called a small world um in a nutshell we help brands be more entertaining we actually recently released a piece of research called entertain or die which looked at the most entertaining brands in the world what makes them entertaining and whether that entertainment value drives share price um but i always feel like the you know it's all well of good talking about theory and when i was speaking to you um dan i said you know we need to bring someone on who's actually practicing this and living it out in the real world and um dean and i have kind of uh been sort of twin flames uh when it comes to entertainment first marketing for a while now and he's the senior director of social media at subway um and they've actually just brought out a fantastic campaign um to coincide with the release of happy gilmore 2 um subway being a brand that is kind of intrinsically linked to uh that that kind of film franchise has made total sense uh to to kind of bring dean on to hopefully talk about entertainment first brand building why it's important um how it works why it works um you know with a living breathing example that's out in the wild right now um so yeah thanks thanks for coming on dean great thanks for having me i appreciate it excited to be here yeah i want to i I want to get into this.

2:10So like, why did the original Happy Gilmore scenes with Subway stick so hard for that audience? And what made it a perfect foundation to build a campaign 30 years later? That's a great question. So, you know, the happy, the original Happy Gilmore and Subway moment, it wasn't just, you know, good product placement. It was perfect cultural placement, in my opinion, at least. It was loud. It was funny. It was unexpected. And I guess just like Happy Gilmore himself, it didn't try too hard to sell you something. It was kind of part of the story, part of the joke, part of what made the movie unforgettable.

2:50And to me, at least, that's why it stuck and it felt real. It lived in the culture. Even 30 years later, I was talking about it. People just didn't remember the sandwich. They remember kind of the feeling and the aura around the film and that connection. So when the sequel came around, it wasn't just about nostalgia for us. It was about picking up the story and pushing it forward. Happy's still that guy. And Subway's still here for the underdogs, the big swings, I guess, the moments that make people smile. So we're not just showing up. I think we belong in the story. We've earned the seat and we're making a massive splash this summer.

3:27So Subway's going to be the only quick service restaurant fully embedded in the Happy Gilmore 2 universe and through film integration in restaurant promotion and a digital ecosystem that will hopefully give fans a real way to play along and immerse themselves in the kind of the Happy Gilmore ecosystem. So with the Happy Gilmore meal and Subway's Happy Place digital hub, we're giving guests a chance to win up to a million dollars in Subway cash,$250 ,000 in Topgolf vouchers. Plus my favorite, we have weekly big ass checks a little queue for the original film with those big golf checks that Happy won.

4:04And we even have a Mountain Dew golf cart that I desperately want myself up for grabs. So to me, at least, it's a true 360 campaign built to honor the film over 30 years later, celebrating the original fans, the new fans, trendy teens, co-viewing audiences to create real value for guests. And every piece of it was designed to be 100 % consumer first. it's actually feels i feel like old thinking that that movie was so long ago and i i those i would say it's the one of the best i feel like they don't make comedy movies like happy gilmore not at all man one of adam's fans is great for sure yeah 1996 was the year so crazy like i feel like i i remember watching that movie and i was just like i there's never been there's never been there's been some movies that are but it's just like one of the ones where you say like what comedy movie do you like love and happy kill more is always in there but like i'm gonna go ask you dan like um like nostalgia is like a key driver in like entertainment and a lot of brands are um using that today but why should brands and why is that brands are using nostalgia in their marketing today yeah i mean i if we're talking about at a macro level it's actually i I think a little bit of a dystopian answer for me to give first, but I feel like as the world gets more and more absurd, ridiculous, and kind of hard to take in many ways, we tend to look for comfort in nostalgia.

5:36We tend to look for comfort in escapism, in absurdism, something that I think Happy Gilmore as a film has in spades. Crazy stat that I saw, which is that Gen Z, 37 % of Gen Z feel nostalgic for the 90s and 12 % of them feel nostalgic for the 70s. both time periods that many of them didn't even live in at all so it's kind of crazy that they're you know um you know harking back to those times so much um i think to dean's point though you know the brilliance of this campaign this um subway doing isn't just down to nostalgia and we'll definitely touch on a fair few of the things they're doing but there's there's a few things that you know dean touched on like building brand law making people feel like they're actually in the world of the film um brand artifacts like the the subway car and and the checks which are kind of things that you know are from the film then brought to life out in the real world um i think there's there's yeah just tons that we can sort of pick up on um and and sort of talk about beyond nostalgia but nostalgia yeah for all of those reasons is just a really strong driver um of uh of kind of a strong driver of branded entertainment basically because it allows us to escape into this other reality going into that like saying it's not just nostalgia you didn't pick this just for nostalgia and i think one of the things you're talking about is building the world but like how did you think about making this more of a for you dean like more of a story instead of just like hey i want to like sponsor happy gilmore like make this a a part a sponsorship just for happy gilmore just for the nostalgia's sake like how how were you thinking about that story weave into this yeah that's a great question so you know sequels and reboots they happen all the time but not all of them especially from a brand perspective are worth betting on you know some feel like hollywood's rolling dice and hoping that we care but this one for us it wasn't that it wasn't a gamble this was a calculated win first you've got sandler back in the driver's seat and when sandler comes back to character you know it's because the story is actually worth telling and then you add Netflix to the mix and the world's biggest streaming platform and suddenly you know we're not just making they're not just making a sequel they're creating a global pop cultural moment and as we spoke about earlier like this the original has a chokehold on audiences nearly 30 years later it's quotable it's part of the cultural fabric people didn't forget it and that's what they've been waiting for you could feel the pent-up demand we even did like a fun little social landscape analysis and a lot of consumer insights about super fandom, the lures, guest perceptions of how this meal might change super fans from the film or current guests.

8:16And it was funny to see even groups of people still dressing up for Halloween as Happy Gilmore, people who weren't even alive when the first one came out. But, you know, we say this isn't nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. We're not dusting off those old VHS tapes and hoping people feel something. We're not here trying to microwave old feelings. We're here trying to create new energy with new stories and new cultural touch points, new ways for fans to jump in and actually play with the brand in ways that we feel are worth their time. We're trying to be respectful and consumer first through every touch point.

8:52So to me, nostalgia on its own is passive. It's a nice feeling, but if that's all you bring to the table, people move on quickly. And what we're trying to do here is take that emotional connection and extend it. We're saying, you love this then, let's make you love it now. And so we're not chasing the past with this promotion. We're trying to help move the story forward with Subway right in the middle of it, with new films, new fans, new ways to engage. Between the in-restaurant experience, the digital hub, the sweepstakes, the social extensions, we're trying to create an entire ecosystem, like Dan said, for fans to step into.

9:28That was really important for us. It's not nostalgia, it's cultural participation it's built for today's audiences with today's behaviors in mind in 2025 and it's the it's in the places where people actually spend their time which is online it's just social and so we didn't tap into a memory we're trying you know to help build a moment i love it and also i it's it's it's really funny that gen z are tapping into like 90s and 70s moments more more like more so than like some millennials i know which is kind of crazy to me to think about but i i want to i want to go into one more question but dean like what would you say is like the most like challenging part of like this operation it was like getting it like stood up or was it like the creative test that you were doing that's a good question i think honestly syncing everything every part of this the cups the creative so we have cups which are collectible cups that's how you participate in the meal um our campaign ethos was more happy so other qsrs with celebrity meal deals or partnerships want to limit your choices and we wanted to give every menu item over to happy and so you can make any meal happy gilmore meal with this collectible cup.

10:51And so, you know, syncing that up, even the developments of the cups, the approval of the creative, the paid, the packaging, the CRM, that's the real muscle. We have 22 ,000 restaurants across the US and in Canada that we're trying to execute this against. So scale is really important. We have to think of like French Canadian audiences, Spanish audiences as well. And so the big idea is one thing, but making sure it shows up everywhere in the same voice with the same energy, that's where campaigns usually fall apart. And I give a lot of credit to our partners at Netflix for keeping us on track.

11:26They're experts at this, and it came down to ruthless alignments and obsessive storytelling. We worked across so many partners. Netflix, Dentsu, our core and social agency, DoorDash, our in-house teams, our influencer agency get engaged and we were all maniacal about making sure every touch point felt like it was part of the same story so whether you saw a cup an instagram ad an email or a scan qr code it had to feel the same with the same tone the same world the same wits because that's how we envision creating cultural moment you can't just have a big idea you need to echo it everywhere with consistency and so it was a lot of late nights a lot of google docs a lot of chasing people down to make sure we stayed sharp but that's the job and so you know we're just we're trying to build a story and we have to protect it at every touch point when we do whether that's external comms internal franchisee facing comms it's all going to feel the same there's there's two things i just want to jump in on quickly there because i think being kind of networked the whole answer was nailed but i think there's something in particular that really landed what what kind of separates entertaining brands from just regular old brands the first thing that dean really spoke about was thinking fan first instead of thinking brand first i think lots of brands have a tendency to you know again think about oh we've made the celebrity partnership let's just make the most of it and everyone really cares about the celebrity and let's plaster that everywhere and make that kind of the lead of the campaign and everyone's just going to go and buy it which is not the case um and you could have seen a version of this you know happy girl more campaign that looked very, very different.

13:01Um, if it was just kind of like talent led Sander led in a way, um, this wasn't, this was participatory and we could talk about all the ways that it is participatory, but it really invites people in to kind of, yeah, again, have their own version of a happy Gilmore meal, have their own version of being in the happy Gilmore world. So I think that was, yeah, perfect. And those are the types of brands where you look at like Duolingo or you look at Liquid Death, they, they do tend to do that really well. They're very fan first and they understand what fan wants, fans want. And then the second thing was that point you made there about across every single touchpoint um the very best entertainment brands adopt this lots of littles mentality so instead of having one big campaign moment they understand that in the the internet algorithmic driven world that we are today it's almost like an internet casino every single time you put out a campaign it has a kind of kind of equal chance um a survival rate as if you put kind of a million dollars into it the same if you put $100 ,000 into it.

13:57And the internet is ultimately this, this world's greatest democracy. And yes, while you can pay for reach and you can pay for eyeballs, you can't pay for engagement. And that's really the, the, the crux of what's going to make something successful or not. So if you can build a system, either one creative campaign that has lots of different touch points that are like lots of little different creative ideas and increase the chance that someone engages with it in a different place. Great. Or if you can build a system where you can create lots of mini campaign ideas so again brands like liquid death and duolingo do this really well you see them have these kind of mini campaign moments across a year rather than one big like super bowl moment for instance you're increasing your chance of kind of winning the internet and winning maximum minutes on the internet yeah and i i mean i will like piggyback on the the the the extra thing you said too dean is like it's not only like those mini touch points is like how the many touch touch points land in like the tone, the voice, like the story, um, because you could put out a lot of mini touch points for, and they, if they don't like tell the same story or don't feel like the guilt, happy Gilmore vibe or like subway and happy build more vibe, you're going to like miss out on that.

15:08So that's why I think people like underestimate, like, like the top level, like getting that voice and tone and story right before doing these touch points. A lot of people go straight to like touch points and not thinking about like how important is like everybody getting the same voice tone um story and what before putting all this out totally and that's why having like a strong messaging hierarchy and a strong interagency team kickoff was so important to us as well i remember we did it on january 27th with a ton of agency partners a ton of discipline owners as well and just laid out the key messages for everybody from consumer PR to CRM to push to digital to make sure everything was consistent and there was no deviating from that as well because it's not just that we were working with Netflix we also have to get approvals from the team at Happy Madison who poured their heart and soul into this this original film and the second film so we want to make sure that we're honoring it in a way that makes them proud and it truly does feel like a partnership instead of a one-sided kind of brand first thing.

16:18We are, you know, placing our bets in the equity and the halo that this film has around it, and we're so excited. I mean, Dan, I want to ask you something. I mean, one of the key parts of this campaign is like the collectible moments that people have. And you see it right now, like a lot of people are into like collecting things and brands, the brands like Liquid Death and all those brands are trying, getting into this collectible moment. Why do you think like collectibles are like just so entertaining and so shareable? Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's two answers to this. The first is what I'd call the Lububu effect, which probably everybody is aware of what a Lububu is by now.

17:09My girlfriend is rapidly trying to buy one every single day across the internet. I think that goes into this, again, this idea of affordable luxury in a world where we can't maybe afford that designer handbag anymore or that sports car or those more luxury collectibles, things that still have that air of kind of luxury to them or this sense of exclusivity to them. now become ever more important or other you know other people call it kind of like the lipstick effect as well so i think there's that but i think in the context of um being an entertaining brand in the context of brands like liquid death you mentioned mischief as well in the new york who in new york who do look like the big red boots and some of the other campaigns that they've released i think what we're seeing there is um brands getting attention by showing effort in a world where anyone can create a piece of content it's fantastic that anyone can create a piece of content, but it also means that we don't see as much or we don't value as much.

18:02We don't see as much effort go into someone who creates a piece of content. So it's no longer good enough for someone to just create a piece of content. And we really want to see people go the extra mile effectively and actually physically almost creating a piece of 3D comedy as Liquid Death would say, creating something that out there in the world that actually takes your point of view and puts it in a physical object, which is so much harder than filming a TikTok on your iPhone, shows and signals effort and makes that thing inherently more shareable. And again, it invites you into the world of this brand as well.

18:31It lets you physically own a piece of that brand equity. It lets you kind of participate in what that brand is doing. So I think that's one of the, you know, again, we talked about the golf cart. I'm now obsessing over that golf cart and want to have that golf cart effectively. Whereas if you just did an advert where, you know, shoot through and happy ride around in the golf cart and have a friendly spat, it's not really something that inherently I might share with my friend on its own. But when you add this other element of me being able to participate, you add this other element of effort that we're seeing in these kind of collectibles and pieces of 3D comedy, it just takes it one step further.

19:05So yeah, with all of our clients, we're always trying to implore them to go that extra mile and show effort. I mean, some brands are even building that directly into their products. So Vacation Inc., for instance, which is a Miami-based brand and a small world client, their products themselves are inherently these pieces of 3D comedy. They have, you know, whipped cream sunscreen, for instance, which is, you know, it doesn't need a TikTok hook because it is the hook itself. And yeah, I think that makes it inherently entertaining and shareable. Dean, I want to ask you one question too, and I'll let you go talk about it.

19:36but i like one thing i want want to know is like for like the audience like how does like a big brand like subway like sync like these like offline experiences and like get make sure that like everything like creative um paid like these collectibles um in re like in store moments are all sync because i mean that's like a lot of moving parts from like working with a creative team to working with retail, working with, I mean, a good agency? Like, what does that look like behind the scenes? Yeah, that's a really great question. I guess in terms of the COPS too, like we wanted to make sure that we were building a solid foundation first and looking at as much data as we could.

20:23So we worked really closely, like to Dan's point, with our incredible consumer insights team at Subway, and we tested everything. And I mean everything. thing. We looked at anticipation and sentiment for the sequel. We tested different self-liquidating offers. So that is what in QSR a cup is called, an SLO. We studied how quickly people planned to watch the film after a draft. We learned about super fandoms. We tracked social listening, etc. And so we did find in consumer testing that this cup is what people crave the most. We tried plushies, collectible cards, a bunch of other things, but this really was by far our most exciting offer to our targeted or our test audience.

21:04And then in terms of your comments on creating things, what we didn't want was to create things just for shock value. We wanted to create things that really did honor the original film and weren't just, you know, something that no one would use in their daily lives, especially cross-referencing our film audiences as well. um so we made sure that when our merch line does come out very shortly um there are things that the film audiences would really want it's not going to be a shock or an omg it's gonna be like oh that's cool i want that um but you know it's it's so difficult for us to sync everything and you know to scale it i touched on it a bit earlier as well and there's just so many interagency team partners, so many agencies, so many custodians of the title from Netflix to Happy Madison to the creative teams.

22:00And it is very, very difficult. It has been over a year in the making to make all of this happen. We have processes, a strong creative tracker, but leading the IAT at Subway was a lot. It was a big job to make sure that we were A, activating on all of our different disciplines, but be activating in a way that we know all of those things would get approved by the teams involved. So it definitely wasn't easy. And then you add in for the first time, since I've known about Subway, where we did a North American collaboration. So that was also tricky is syncing up the Canadian team with the US team, making sure that the promotion was working in a way that it needed to, to drive business traffic and sales across both markets and the creative would land in both markets and even in in uh quebec or french canada too so that was definitely a challenge not not something that i i need a little bit of a vacation from i have to admit i think also what's really cool i mean i think when brands do this well is like when the collectible and like the rewards like align with like the actual movie itself like the golf card uh like the resort golf resort like like it's aligning with like what the movie actually does and it's going to bring the fans that are like the fans who are watching the movie are the ones who are probably like also like golfer uh like are interested in like the golf so it's like aligning those two rewards make it feel like more of the story than just having like you could have just said you won a million dollars or like something like you could have made a simple like cash prizes but you went deep into like also like connecting the prizes with the the movie totally yeah i always think about it as like um like date and marry like like maybe you're interested in a little bit date is like oh i'm gonna engage with that social post it's entertaining it's providing value but the mary is like i'm gonna spend additional money on a piece of merchandise because that's how invested I am in this partnership or this promotion.

24:14And so I'm interested. This is the first film promotion we've done at Subway in nine years since 2016. And it'll be interesting to see how fast those pieces of merchandise sell out and how quickly those super fandoms, as you mentioned, want to accelerate from like to marry and, you know, put money behind that as well. So we'll see. it's the brilliance of framing isn't it like that's you know it's inherently more shareable ironically to say um you know instead of here's a million dollars uh like mr b style right you can have a million dollars or you can have a private island right and it's like the private island maybe cost 700 grand and cost a little bit less than the million dollars but that private island in your head suddenly feels like it's worth a billion dollars right it's all about the framing in the context of who you're actually um offering that prize to as you said and in this case it's fans of the film that golf cart is far less than a million dollars but it automatically feels like a better prize um just because of the yeah money can't buyness of it almost yeah and yeah i mean like when you're thinking of like six thousand or ten thousand dollars for a golf cart like you're not like thinking like i'm winning a ten thousand dollar golf cart you're like thinking like oh i can win a golf cart like it's you don't think of like the monetary value when it's like especially when you're connecting it to that and i want to go into a little a deeper side i mean like like basically like scooter and happy uh from the boom are like the the brand characters here so um i'm gonna ask it for dan um like is there like a resurgence happening when it comes to like brand characters and why do you think if so why yeah i mean i i 100 believe that and i mean there's some high profile examples, um, like Duolingo or even, um, brands in the QSR category, for instance, like, uh, McDonald's are bringing back a lot of their brand mascots from the archive actually, which is both nostalgia and brand character.

26:07But I think we had, um, I almost feel like marketing got quite self-serious through the kind of purpose era, um, through the early two thousands and into maybe like the mid, you know, mid 2015, et cetera. And then we had the kind of end of this purpose era. And then we saw kind of a, uh, uh, particularly in America, we saw this return to a sort of more absurd, silly, um, you know, escapist form of marketing. And in that world, brand characters are super important. And there's actually tons of research that shows that brand characters are far more effective, um, at driving brand awareness and brand salience, uh, than, you know, celebrities, for instance, that you, that you might use.

26:42So even though in this instance, you know, yes, Adam Sandler is a celebrity. His character of Happy is more of a mascot, if you will. And because there's already this sort of credit built up in people's head about his association with Subway from the original film, it doesn't feel like it's kind of like a cash grab or inauthentic. It feels like it's kind of true to that. It works really well and it makes a lot of sense and it works as a really great kind of temporary brand asset for Subway, if you will. um so yeah it's very clever yeah and i think i mean it also i mean you talked about this earlier about it like tapping into like fandoms and fan first and i like those i mean they are fans of happy and um fans of um scooter and like in this case dean you made scooter like the the villain of like the the the world um and you could talk a little bit about that but like like through your like research you probably like saying like like people like when you all these people who dressed up as happy gilmore like people still thinking about happy gilmore now like when the film like got launched again uh like that they were remaking this film um you probably saw like people wanted to see happy succeed again you probably want it like people now are excited about happy so like could you go a little bit of like who came up with like making scooter the villain in the story right?

28:07Sure. So Shooter McGavin. Shooter. Shooter. Shooter. Shooter. Shooter likes it hot. Yeah. Well, it's been 30 years. I'm so bad. Yeah. 30 years. I mean. Exactly. I don't blame you. The genius behind, you know, bringing Shooter McGavin back as the jealous villain, you know, there's one person really responsible for that. And her name is Shadera. She's a brilliant creative partner at Netflix. and so she came up with this idea and honestly it's it's everyone's favorite idea plays into the entire campaign but shooter's energy and people remember this energy even 30 years later it's just so right he's like he's petty he's competitive he's a little unhinged and and now without even knowing it he's becoming our official unofficial spokesperson so shooter wants less happy always and subway wants to give you more and that tension it's hilarious it brings the whole extra layer of fun to the campaign.

29:05And a shout out, you know, to our partners at Dentsu who really dialed up the storytelling and made sure that the creative landed across every channel in the way that it needed to, to feel cohesive and smart, platform specific. But it's playful. It's self-aware and honestly, it's really fun to root against Shooter again. We've used Christopher McDonald with Shooter McGavin in our commercials for Social First. We did a line of ads for social specifically. And then we also did Above the Line as well. And he's just such an incredible human being. We just had a media event in New York two days ago with him and stayed to the very end.

29:43Just an incredible person to work with. And I think the fandom and his villain-like lure are still holding true even 30 years later. And he still looks the same too. He still looks great i'm jealous i am so mad i messed up his name it's just this is like hurting my heart but i also want to talk about i mean we talk about brand um like brand characters but you also made collabs with like mountain dew and doritos so how did you make that weave into the story as well? That's a good question. So it's tricky. So we have an amazing relationship with our partners at PepsiCo, and they provide our beverages and our drinks across the country.

30:37And it's really kicking off this summer 100%. So they played a really fun role in the campaign by sponsoring Subway's Happy Place, which is our digital hub, where fans, as we talked about, can win a million dollars in Subway cash or epic prizes. And we work closely with them, at Pepsi Frito-Lay to make sure that their involvement is added real value for our guests. It wasn't about cramming in extra brands. It was about creating bigger, better rewards that made the whole experience more exciting than first, as Dan had mentioned as well, in a way that really respected our proprietary partnership with Netflix as well as the film.

31:17So hopefully we did everybody justice. But the folks at Mountain Dew have been incredible to work with, incredible partners. We've partnered with them early in the year on Doritos Footlong Nachos, which were a big success for us as well, and a bunch of more things to come. So when we thought about partners, they're our number one partner for sure. And we wanted to see how we could bring them along for the ride as well, because they always do the same for us. um dan i also want to go to you i mean we we talked a little bit about like fandoms like why do you think it's so important um to have fandoms in like the fast food space i mean we've seen mcdonald's do great work with us lately as well as subways doing great work with us lately so why do you uh think it's so important to activate fandoms yeah i mean first of all i think it's important for any brand to do that but particularly high uh high what we call high interest brands or high interest categories which i would say food in general is but in particular um in particular fast food you know that they're categories where you really do need to stand out because there are lots of competitors who are marketing in that space and they're all pretty competent and good at marketing themselves as well um so in the modern day today when you are trying to you know not act like an advertiser but act like an entertainer then you really need to understand what people are fans of effectively.

32:40Because as we spoke about earlier, Newsflash, they aren't necessarily fans of your brand or your product inherently. I think, again, a really good example of that is if you look at the likes of Duolingo, a language learning app, or Liquid Death, Canned Water, neither of those products, I think anyone would wake up in the morning and be like, I'm a massive fan of canned water. And I sit down and watch a TV show about a can of water. Although Liquid Death might change that in the future. but what they are fans of are Game of Thrones, Squid Games, Happy Gilmore and even kind of other smaller niche interest groups so what savvy brands are doing is they're understanding well we want to piggyback effectively off the fame of some of those niches and the very best ones aren't just saying well we're going to do like again a quick cash grab a sponsorship of a show or like an ident they're saying well how do we actually participate in these fandoms how do we add value to them um how do we turn up in the spaces where these fandoms are happening both digitally and in the real world and how do we actually do something that doesn't make us feel like kind of a sore thumb sticking out there and almost like uh i don't know if you've seen that meme of steve buscemi where he's like hi fellow kids and he kind of rocks up how do we not going to be seen as a sort of cringe um sort of brand in the room but actually just be like cool here's the tools for you to play within this fandom you know we've got the cash um we've got the ideas and we're kind of offering that up to you so again yeah the likes of subway likes of duolingo um they're the ones who are doing really well um in the space of fandom and i think just that we might touch on it at the very end but one thing that you can do today if you're like well i don't know what founders my audience group are interested in you can do something called fandom mapping um and maybe again we'll touch on that just before the end but it's a really simple first research task basically that you can do to understand what people that are interested in or followers of your brand what their fandoms might be.

34:31That's amazing. Yeah, I think that, yeah, you want to go and piggyback that? Oh, sure. I was just going to say, Dan and I met at Possible in Miami a couple months back, and we were so intrigued by this concept from a social first perspective of branded entertainment with small worlds and the incredible work that they do. And so we've worked together off and on for the last couple months, mapping out some fandoms for Subway, looking at our branded entertainment score, seeing where we can do better, how we track against other competitors within the QSR space. So I'm really interested, to Dan's point, to see maybe how Happy Gilmore and this work might change that.

35:11I mean, I think we're doing okay, but there were definitely opportunities that Dan and his team had mapped out through those fandoms and through branded entertainment scores where we could excel in or do better in. And hopefully we will with this campaign um but i think that the fandoms that they identified for us a couple months back were super helpful to understand where we could win what kind of content would resonate and even to like how we adapt the central ethos of the let's say the comedy um to different targets and different audiences like to tap into zillennials or you know gen z on tiktok versus an older audience on facebook who might have more nostalgia with the film super important to us so um the fandoms really did help guide a lot of the work that we did yeah i'll go deeper than that i mean because like happy gilmore is like example of a fandom but like it had a land in like a culturally relevant moment which is like the movie coming out because if you like launched the fandom at the wrong time like you might this might not have hit as well but like aligning like you know people are going to talk about happy gilmore when the movie comes out there's going to be word of mouth and then your brand is showing up on all these other channels social um retail all over um ads organic that makes a lot of sense but also like i bet you when you map these out there's also like some evergreen fandoms too right like there's like fandoms that you are like people are fans of every single day like like deeper fandoms that would connect with subway fans so what are the like going deeper into like fandoms what does that fandom mapping look like like what i since you talked about like let's go a little deeper into that um yeah so again this process of fandom mapping is it's again something that perhaps i've coined and i've put over the top of it but it is It's fundamentally good research and doing good research with your customers.

37:21Again, McDonald's, Whiten and Kennedy's have famously written a really great article that you can probably find online all about how they approached the process and how they did a combination of call and social listening and went into McDonald's basically in each of the 50 states within the US and kind of understood how people like to eat their McDonald's, but then equally kind of what they were doing around that experience of getting a McDonald's. Were they going back to their house and jumping on headset with their friends to play Call of Duty or Fortnite? Were they, you know, watching a sports match with it?

37:54Were they grabbing it because they're at like an anime conference in between? And they've done lots of different activations that have touched on all of those different things. And I think we would basically help clients do the same thing. So we would start with obviously customers themselves and whatever access we can get to customers to talk about that. And then we do, um, yeah, a piece of social listening effectively. And we've actually got our own tool that we've, we've now built to, to do this. Um, uh, thanks to the wonders of, of AI has made things like, uh, you know, simple, simpletons like me be able to do things with kind of like no code tools that can make these things easier.

38:28But effectively what you're doing is, as I said, looking at followers of your brand and then understanding and mapping out what they also follow and, and, and understanding the, kind of top priority connections amongst that. So there might be a particular thing on social that tends to be trending amongst that particular audience that they tend to be following, whether again, it'd be like anime or whether it be horror films or whether it be a particular celebrity like Taylor Swift, for instance, and kind of a Swifties phenomenon. And from there, you can start to piece out what these different fandoms are and understand how niche is too niche and then what those kind of hidden gems are almost.

39:07What are those ones that perhaps aren't like a massive trend or like a massive fandom that feels almost like too homogenous? So like, for instance, I wouldn't say sport is when we're doing fandom mapping, sport isn't a fandom that's way too big. In the same way, like I wouldn't say gaming is a fandom. That's literally like saying, you know, every sport. Again, you want to go a little bit more detailed than that, I suppose, and then pick out kind of more specific examples. But then equally, you don't want to go super, super niche where, again, it feels like something that's maybe more of a trend or a hashtag.

39:36Like when that story about whether 100 men can beat one gorilla in a fight, I wouldn't call that a fandom. I'd call that a trend, for instance. So there is kind of like a balancing act, I guess, in terms of what's considered the sweet spot of fandom. And you're probably looking like, do I want to do a regional fandom mapping? Do I want to launch a regional thing like Miami FC with Messi? Do we want to roll it out in Miami? or is there like something more national like happy gilmore or something like that where there's a fandom to do like a whole a whole country yeah no exactly and again it's yes deciding deciding range and scale and i mean there's another way of approaching it as you said there with fandoms where if we took the happy gilmore away of it which makes it quite contextual to the u.s but if we're talking about fandom mapping more generally the fandoms that exist within the uk might be found might be very different will be very different some of the fandoms that exist within the US equally.

40:33So yeah, this isn't just a one and done type of activity. This is something that you need to kind of refresh on an ongoing basis, just as you'd refresh your marketing plan kind of each year and tweak your segments or tweak your targeting. None of this flies in the face of like traditional marketing science, I would say. Going back to Dean, like Happy Gilmore big moment, like where is the next like big space that you see for Subway? that's a great question i uh you know i think for us happy game or two isn't the finish line it's hopefully the launching pad in terms of the way that we ingratiate ourselves into culture and become part of it again but um what we unlocked here is a new way of showing up it's it's bolder it's more playful it's more culturally connected and uh it's not a one-time thing hopefully it will be a blueprint for how subway moves forward uh the white space i think is about finding more moments where we can live inside culture and not just advertise around it whether that's through entertainment or sports or gaming or unexpected collaborations we're looking for ways to be part of the story in ways that feel real and find our and fun for guests and authentic for our guests too.