Subway

Background

With over 37,000 locations in more than 100 countries, Subway is one of the most recognized fast-food brands on the planet. But in today’s fast-moving content landscape, global recognition isn’t enough—local relevance is everything.

Subway faced a critical challenge: how to deliver culturally attuned, region-specific marketing campaigns across the globe without ballooning costs or diluting brand voice.

That’s when they partnered with Valley Bridge Partners to lead an AI-powered transformation of their marketing engine—designed to scale smart, local storytelling across every market they serve.

The Challenge

• Slow Campaign Turnaround: Regional markets waited weeks for localized materials from global agencies.
• One-Size Messaging: Global campaigns often missed cultural context, slang, humor, and preferences.
• High Cost of Localization: Custom content for every market was prohibitively expensive.
• Brand Inconsistency: Franchises often improvised, creating off-brand or unapproved messaging.

Our Approach

Valley Bridge deployed a global Generative AI Marketing Stack tailored to Subway’s international scale:

1. Multilingual Narrative Engine

A custom large language model (LLM) trained on Subway’s brand voice, tone, historical campaigns, and customer sentiment across regions. This engine could:

• Autogenerate region-specific press releases, social posts, email copy, and video scripts
• Adjust voice, humor, and cultural references for each target country
• Recommend product pairings and taglines unique to local menus

2. Trend-Aware Localization Engine

We built integrations that monitored regional social media, food culture, and viral trends to localize content based on what audiences cared about now.

• Example: In Mexico, campaigns incorporated trending street food slang; in Korea, we referenced popular mukbang YouTubers.

3. Local Market Campaign Generator

We gave regional Subway teams a self-serve AI dashboard that allowed them to:

• Input brief product goals and get regionally adapted, brand-safe campaign suggestions
• Instantly translate and adjust for cultural context
• Customize without waiting for global approval cycles

4. Performance Feedback Loop

All AI-generated content was connected to Subway’s analytics systems, enabling real-time performance learning:

• Markets that saw better CTRs or conversions influenced future AI output
• Models improved based on what actually worked in each country

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