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You are now enteringAd Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
Take a trip back in time with me, to the decade that we have chosen, for better or worse, to call “the 2000’s”.
Many things define this unique period in history: the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the rise of smartphones and social media. But today we discuss perhaps that era’s greatest legacy: ugly ass Flash-animated cartoons that are equal parts juvenile humor and dada-esque surrealism.
Off At Quiznos
With computer technology making it increasingly easy to both produce and distribute animation, there was a great boom of … shall we say,
Cartoons. Cartoons that defied conventional joke or story structure, subverted standards of “good” voice acting or character design, and just generally challenged ideas of good taste.
Began life as such an animated short in the 90’s), but with the now-ubiquity of the Internet, and with the Adult Swim network building its whole brand around this sort of animation, there were more of these cartoons being watched by more people than ever before.
The Quiznos Crisis: Trouble At The Sandwich Counter
Only in the 2000’s, in this very specific environment, could a Quiznos executive have watched Joel & Alex Veitch’s surreal, nonsensical cartoon short “We Like the Moon” and decide, “Hey, if we change the lyrics to be about sandwiches, this could make a great commercial!”
Successful. The animated creatures (referred to as “spongmonkeys” and as Quiznos’ “spokesthings”) were so completely odd in every detail, they couldn’t help but grab attention. I guarantee you, people were
But getting attention is only half the job. You also have to make your restaurant seem like something people would enjoy, which is where they ran into trouble. These sorts of surreal cartoons may have been at their height of popularity, but they were still never
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. While some people enjoyed the sheer oddity of the spongmonkeys, many others found their off-key singing to be annoying beyond belief, and some found them to be so darn strange, they were actually unsettling to look at.
A handful of spongmonkey ads were released over the course of about a year, before the ad campaign was quietly dropped, to be forgotten in the mists of time … or until the 2030’s, most likely, when the nostalgia cycle will have moved on to remaking every bit 2000’s pop culture, and we’ll get the Spongmonkey Cinematic Universe.
The Avocado uses cookies to help us with usage statistics. If you would like to review the cookies that we collect, please view our Privacy Policy page.OkPrivacy policyLove them or hate them, the Quiznos Spongmonkeys were so annoying they changed advertising forever. Here’s how a viral video turned into a terrifying sandwich ad
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In 2004, 41-year-old Ty Harper was an experienced art director about to launch a major ad campaign based on an idea he had pitched to Quiznos. The sandwich chain said they wanted to get noticed, and he gave them exactly what they wanted: the Spongmonkey.
It was a simple concept. Harper had found a viral video featuring creatures called Spongmonkeys singing about their love of the moon. Why not have them singing about toasted subs instead? I mean, who could resist?
A lot of people, as it turned out. The backlash against the campaign was near instantaneous — and universal. “People were saying it was just a bunch of singing rats, and I was like, ‘Well, first of all, they’re not rats. If you look closely, they’re carefully constructed of seven different animals, ’” Harper tells me.
Quiznos T Shirt
His argument, however, was unconvincing. The Quiznos Spongmonkey frequently makes the cut on “all-time worst mascots” lists and advertising experts consider it a love-or-hate property (at best). The only thing everyone seems to agree on: How the fuck did these commercials come to be in the first place?
Spongmonkey creator and animator Joel Veitch, 46, of Rather Good , says he and his brother wrote the song that would one day become an advertising earworm during a beer-fueled night in the U.K. “I was in the pub with my brother, and we were talking about how great the moon was while we got a bit tipsy, ” he tells me.
They were soon back at home, drinking even more beer, when they got out the guitar and Veitch improvised some lyrics paying homage to the moon. The next day, he looked back at the video recording of the impromptu songwriting session and was shocked to find that he didn’t hate it. In fact, he was inspired. He had been working with some characters he called Spongmonkeys (Veitch was active on a British website called b3ta where “spong” — adding large eyes with small pupils to images — was a popular practice), and he put together a little animated video where his creatures sang his moon anthem. “We shoved it up on the internet, and, um, that’s how it all started, ” he explains.
Beyond Mortgage Backed Securities
The video quickly went viral, reaching over a million views, which was quite a feat in the pre-social media and YouTube era. One of the people who came across it was Harper, who went down a late-night rabbit hole that led him to the work of Rather Good. He bookmarked the “We Love the Moon” video and left it at that. “I had no clue why I was bookmarking it, but I had a feeling that it would come in handy someday, ” he says. “I was just mesmerized.”
A few months later, Quiznos approached his agency, the Martin Agency, to pitch a massive national campaign that would make a big splash. Harper knew just the thing to get the company noticed: Spongmonkeys earnestly singing about their love for subs. He and his partner at the time quickly rewrote the lyrics, keeping true to the lack of cynicism in the original. According to Harper, now 57, the lyrics came out effortlessly. “We were sitting there crying laughing, thinking, ‘No one’s ever gonna buy this, but boy, it’s a great way to kill an afternoon, ’” he laughs. “We showed them to the creative director, and he just kind of took off his glasses and rubbed his bridge of his nose.”
But he went for it, and to everyone’s surprise, so did Quiznos — after a strategic pitch, that is. The Martin Agency showed Quiznos a video of college kids reacting to the “We Like the Moon” video, leaving them wondering what exactly had their target audience in stitches. Next, they showed the Quiznos suits Veitch’s video. The idea being that they’d now find it hilarious and not odd, which is exactly what happened. The only problem? They had to get Veitch on board. Harper remembers the email he sent to Veitch well: “I was like, ‘You’re not gonna believe this…’ I told him I worked in advertising and gave him the long story short, before asking him if he’d be interested. Luckily he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’”
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Veitch, though, was bewildered. Given that he was in the U.K., he had no idea what Quiznos even was. Nonetheless, he and his brother were quickly flown out to animate the ads as well as sing the new songs, which he sang all night until his voice was raw. The first commercial dropped soon thereafter:
Months later, Veitch was back in the U.K., working as an animator on a late-night TV show, and not really thinking much about the ads when they first began airing in the U.S. His email blew up immediately. “Nobody around me had a clue what was happening, it was all in another country for a brand they’d never heard of, ” he says. Still, the reaction resulted in his website crashing when over a quarter of a million people went to check out his work.
Unfortunately, the backlash was just as swift. Within the first week of the campaign, Quiznos corporate received more than 30, 000 calls complaining about the Spongmonkeys. Per a 2004 article from the Denver Business Times , an Alabama Quiznos franchisee even put up signs in his windows saying he wasn’t responsible for the ads, as they were turning away customers and making children cry.
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In fairness, Aundra Madden, a 27-year-old in Canada, says she’s still haunted by the ads. “I was roughly 10 years old and in British Columbia visiting my dad when my young mind was molested by those absolute hell beasts, ” she tells me. She first saw them after a long flight and was sure they were merely a jet-lag-induced hallucination. All these years later, it continues to be an inside joke between her and her dad: “He still jokes about taking me to Quiznos to see the road-kill monkeys EVERY chance he gets.”
Not that any of this bothered Veitch. “I just pictured them being seen in these Middle American living rooms — people who never had anything to do with internet culture, ” he says. “We were just forcing that on everybody.”
Quiznos, of course, backtracked almost from the jump. “The client came to us and
