Subway pulls Sarah Wilson ads after complaint from TV presenter
Subway has pulled its ads featuring a character talking about the eating habits of Sarah Wilson.
The move comes hours after TV presenter and journalist Wilson – who specialises in writing about nutrition – told Mumbrella that she had not endorsed the campaign and wanted it withdrawn.
The ad:
Right, a fictional character who sounds a lot like the real Sarah Wilson and who apparently also enjoys a healthy lifestyle.
What a coincidence.
Why not just change the name!
Hmmmm… why pull it then?
That’s kind of awkward for Mojo.
Either admit that you’re ripping off her name.
Or admit that although you work for a food brand you have so little awareness of the sector and you had done so little research that you hadn’t heard of one of the best known nutrition writers in the country and didn’t do any basic checks before using the name.
Tricky.
why use a full name in the first place? wouldn’t have made a lick of difference to the creative if the talent said “I envy Sarah and her……….” to remove any hint of a real person’s name.
the fact they used a full name unnecessarily and it happens to be someone in the nutrition industry feels deliberate to me, and a bit more than cheeky.
they were very quick to pull it too, smacks of guilt.
There’s this thing called Google that searches all over the interwebs for references. When I typed in ‘Sarah Wilson’ the first thing that came up was Sarah Wilson’s blog (yes she of the anti-sugar nutrition thing). Took less than a second.
Research. Its not rocket surgery.
*Cough* Bullsh!t….
Thats just awkward and rubbish
Actually I don’t know that it is that much of a stretch. To be fair, Sarah and Wilson are both highly common names. Indeed Wilson is almost generic in the Jones and Smith tradition.
While readers of this blog know who the real Sarah Wilson is, does she really have that big of a profile outside of media circles? If you ask around the general public I think you’ll find not. A little watched Foxtel series and lifestyle blog hardly a household name does make. Her highest profile gig was MasterChef, wherein she failed to resonate with the audience so much the network ditched her the first chance they got.
Hey, I’m going to create a TV campaign for cola featuring a fictional character named Elle MacPherson.
Oh, you mean it’s already been done?
That’s why Dickens made up all his character names.
Maybe they should have tried something like Lucy Dribblechin or Margaret Toolazyto makeasimplesandwich.
Brett, you sound a bit bitter and twisted there. Perhaps you’re jealous your not the rich boyfriend mentioned in the ad! And you seem to know a lot about her career for someone who claims she’s not a household name!
OK. So using Google Search :
* Subway returned 150m results
* Systems returned 2.26b results
* Australia returned 3.78b results
So using their own logic these are pretty common words, so they’d be totally fine with me marketing food using the company name Subway Systems Australia. Utter bullshit.
Hey Mumbrella, was my response to Megan deleted? And if, may I ask why? She made a silly and unnecessary personal sledge against me when my comments were in no way malicious and entirely relevant to the subject being debated (ie: could Subway have made an honest mistake in unknowingly using the highly common name of a blogger and presenter of moderate public profile?) so I can’t understand any reason one comment would be published and yet the response withheld.
I take it as confirmation Megan is, as I suspected, either a friend or PR colleague of Sarah Wilson’s which is why you decided not to publish my response. But if so then you really shouldn’t have published hers either.
Hi Brett,
I’m mobile at the moment so cannot easily double check in the back end. I do remember moderating one comment that had an attack in the last line that went beyond our comment moderation policy. I can’t remember if that was you or not.
Please do feel free to comment, but as for everyone please do keep it civil.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Brett, while Sarah Wilson may not be well known to you, I’d suspect you’re probably falling outside of her demographic which I suspect is highly female. The subway ad also sounded highly female targeted as well.
Similar to most of the advertising industry, I’m from overseas and yes, I’d even heard of her before I moved to Australia and not through working in advertising but because I read lifestyle blogs.
The point is, any company should do a little research to see how the ad could possibly backfire. I’ve worked on some twitter campaigns where we’ve had to use the ever so scientific Google, Urban Dictionary and generally just send out a mass company email to get feedback of how our hash tag term or ad could potentially go wrong. Regardless there was no need for the usage of both her first and last name and I find it hard to believe no one at any of the agency’s or subway knows who she is considering she’s pretty high profile for anyone who works with/around “healthy eating”.
@Unknown: some good points there and I certainly don’t disagree with you that it’s a big fail on the part of the company not to have at least embarked on a little research before signing off on the ad.
But I still suspect it was an error brought about by clumsiness and laziness rather than a concerted effort to capitalise on the real Sarah Wilson’s name. As someone who once worked in radio (am now a producer in TV), the use of names in ads on Australian radio has always been embarrassingly beige: ie: Bill Jones, Mary Smith. So on that basis the likelihood of some dopy copywriter coming up with Sarah Wilson in all innocence truly doesn’t seem implausible.
Just finally I grant you I am not within her demo and am sure if I didn’t work in the industry I would be clueless to her identity but I still maintain her profile is one that only works in context. To a mainstream audience hers is a name, especially in the absence of a photo or vision that the medium of radio cannot provide, that would usually require a bit of an explanation: “She’s that girl that used to host Masterchef” etc. So I really don’t think it’s a name with sufficient recognition for Subway to have used in this fashion. I reckon they are guilty of being stupid as opposed to being underhanded.