What You Didn't Know About Quiznos' YouTube Channel
In the midst of what now appears as Quiznos' eternal decline, the company decided that instead of investing the energy into bettering their relationship with their aggrieved franchisees, they needed to create a branded version of CollegeHumor called ToastyTV. The idea, as Quiznos's director of interactive and innovation Tim Kraus explained to Entrepreneur, was to fill a video website with Quiznos content for their core demographic of young men between their teens and their thirties who eat sandwiches and watch lots of videos. For some reason, marketing changes are always the solution to structural problems.
Anyway, in practice, Quiznos managed to spend both too much time and not enough time on a series of attempted parodies and. .. parodic lobster erotica?
While we will cover the latter, the most viewed of the former category is "A House of Thrones," a "Game of Thrones" and "House of Cards" mashup in which a Frank Underwood impersonator poisons the Baratheons while claiming a full stomach due to a Quiznos he ate earlier. Others include "Mad X-Men," in which the X-Men travel back in time to save Don Draper by having him sell Quiznos, a "History of Bromance" with Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon impersonators parodying "Evolution of Dance" with a shout out to Quiznos, and "Footnotes," a parody of Timberlake and Fallon's "Hashtag" but with the impersonators dressed as Franklin and Jefferson who invent toasty subs during their rapport, and "Startourage: The Foursome Awakens" with Quiznos appearing as refreshments for the filming of "The Force Awakens."
So that happened
While these may strike some as half-baked trend chasers that use parody to the extent that it allows them fair use of marketing signifiers without doing anything interesting with it, YouTube commenters and articles like this Social Media Today piece on "Startourage" seem to have liked them.
No one, however, seems taken with "Lobster Boy," which seems intended as a family friendly Quiznos lobster take on the parody adult videos. The man in a lobster costume gets lathered in butter and his claws bound in the rubber bands regularly used on lobsters by three ladies before a poorly executed green screen. Nothing actually dirty happens, making the whole thing somehow weirder.
No one watches it, no one mentions it, but it captures all of the unfunny jokes told when ToastyTV is at its worst. Why does this exist?
As all this began, it appears marketing people attempted to mirror the fleeting signs of trends at the expense of delving into either the trends' substance or the reasons why Quiznos franchises dwindled by ninety percent in one decade, according to Restaurant Business's data. In a 2016 piece for BrandBa.se, Lukas Morinder praised ToastyTV: "By forming a solid strategy, providing compelling content through a new media platform, and combining it with storytelling Quiznos have managed to engage with a totally new audience." In 2021, Toasty.TV and Quiznos ceased uploading ToastyTV videos to YouTube. And, considering the chain's continued decline, the videos even failed their expressed purpose.