“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.”
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. Spanish bank Santander sponsors the Ferrari and McLaren teams in
F1 but their drivers do not feature in the same advertisements.
Sponsoring several teams along with F1 itself would have a high-octane price
tag. The cost of a global partnership of F1 alone comes to an average of
$20m annually with team agreements required in addition to that. Subway has
adequate resources at its disposal as it reportedly had revenue of $18.2bn
in 2012.
F1 would help to boost Subway’s profile in Europe where it is rapidly
expanding. It currently has 1,731 stores in the UK and Ireland but it
announced in January that it wants to grow to 3,000 by 2020 which would give
it far more than rivals such as McDonald’s and Greggs.