Subway Family Guy Advergame

Subway, king of mass produced meats and cheeses loaded onto six-inch rolls, has created a pretty decent advergame in affiliation with the TV show Family Guy. Available Here, “The Quahog Triangle” is a sweepstakes giveaway type of game, seemingly modeled off of McDonald’s success with their annual Monopoly giveaway efforts.

When you enter The Quahog Triangle, you are immediately prompted to give your email address in order to participate, which is pretty clever in itself, as this is an excellent way to track the campaign’s success, as well as to add names to the surely ever-expanding Subway customer database. You also have to submit your physical mailing address, as well as your birth date. Also, surprise, surprise, the text that allows you to opt out of future mailings through Subway is rather small and discretely located on the sign-in page. This is by no means a bad idea for Subway, however, as increasing their physical mailing list will be nothing other than beneficial for them.

Through the game, you can “Test your trivia smarts, send an e-card, play for a chance to instantly win over $100,000 in cash and prizes…and more!” The entire game, obviously, is designed and executed with a Family Guy theme and format. This is a rather clever affiliation, as long as Subway is hoping to target a younger demographic with their marketing efforts here. I suppose that any high school kid with some lunch money in suburbia may become somewhat more predisposed to select Subway as their luncheon destination of choice after playing this game. Then again, maybe not. However, either way, they have covered all of their bases with this campaign, and done as much as possible to promote it (so it seems).

Making the game incentive-based will likely greatly increase the participation rates, making it based around Family Guy may even further increase those rates. In addition, they have solicited some pretty decent affiliate promotion for the game; maxim magazine is one example of this. They have increased their visibility through Maxim’s Online Contests, where there is an animated link to the game. This audience is likely on-point, but it may be a stark contrast to Subways usual, wholesome, family-oriented brand image that they try to display. Integrating their marketing communications in order to deliver a consistent brand image may not be Subway’s strong suit. However, the odds that this game’s promotion on maxim.com would be brought to the attention of conservative Subway regular patrons are rather slim, so this will not likely hurt them in any way.

The Quahog Triangle game itself is as simple as clicking a button to start the triangle, and clicking a button to stop it. It is essentially a free, virtual slot machine. However, as always, luck doesn’t exactly prevail for me…I lost. If anybody plays it and actually wins anything, please let me know through a comment below. Upon losing, you are prompted to “Tell your friends” about the game by way of an E-Card to their email address…this is a good way to increase word-of-mouth about the campaign, and a way that makes it easy for the user on the site to do so.

The game itself lacks any true Family Guy humor; in fact, it is basically devoid of humor of any kind, which is a bit strange. However, overall, it is a good co-sponsorship tool for Subway to promote its products, and for Family Guy to promote its show, and the Family Guy Season 5 DVD Boxed Set, which is now available for purchase.