The Strange Quiznos Monkey Commercial You May Not Remember
When you're making advertisements for your brand, no matter what product you happen to be selling, you want to make it as memorable as possible. Sometimes, you can achieve this by activating your audience's cuteness receptors. During 2014's Super Bowl XLVIII, Budweiser dropped the instant classic "Puppy Love" commercial, which featured an adorable little dog continuously escaping his home to play with the brewer's famous Clydesdales, per Inc. Magazine.
While everyone loves looking at adorable puppies, you don't need to tug at the heartstrings to make your advertisement memorable. In fact, sometimes the opposite tactic can be effective. For example, 2016's Super Bowl 50 introduced audiences to the "Puppy Monkey Baby," a monstrous amalgamation of three supposedly cute things that hawked Mountain Dew Kickstart, MEL Magazine explains.
However, the puppy monkey baby is nowhere near as unsettling as another brand mascot, which was introduced to unsuspecting and utterly unprepared consumers in 2004. These crudely-animated singing characters extolled the virtues of toasty Quiznos subs in one of the most bizarre fast food commercials of all time (via Time).
The strange singing spongmonkeys
It makes sense that Quiznos would want to stand out among the countless American chain sandwich shops, but they might have gone about it in the wrong way. According to Slate, Quiznos introduced the spongmonkeys to the national discourse in 2004. (No, that isn't a typo — they're literally called spongmonkeys).
These bizarre creatures were not an original Quiznos creation. They're the brainchild of a man named Joel Veitch, who works for Britain's Channel 4. Per MEL Magazine, the Martin Agency, an advertising firm, found one of Veitch's viral videos while crafting a campaign for Quiznos. The video featured a pair of hat-wearing rodents singing their praises of the moon, and the Martin Agency creatives realized that the song and characters could be used in their advertisements.
Huffpost tells us that the first spongmonkey advertisement was released during 2004's Super Bowl XXXVII. On Veitch's Youtube channel, Rathergood, you can watch the original commercial, wherein the creatures screech about Quiznos' pepper bar.
Veitch told Huffpost that his favorite advertisement featured the spongmonkeys wearing horned helmets and declaring that they are not savage Huns, and as such, would never deign to consume untoasted subs. You can also view this ad on the Rathergood Youtube channel.
The lasting legacy of the spongmonkeys
If the goal of an advertisement is only to stick in the mind of consumers, then the spongmonkeys certainly did their job. In the first week after the Super Bowl ad spot alone, Quiznos was bombarded with a whopping 30,000 complaint calls, per Mel Magazine. However, AdAge's Bob Garfield awarded the commercial 3.5 out of 4 stars, arguing that the spongmonkeys ditty was catchy, in a perverse sense of the word.
People remember these horrifying, hamster-adjacent mascots to this day. In a short skit, TikTok user @melissakristintv plays a person who, haunted by the memory of the spongmonkeys, can't eat Quiznos to this day. When TikTok user @rebarrabonbon asked millennials which advertisement from the early 2000s was still stuck in their minds, @potterybydanielle stitched the video with a clip of the commercial, quoting the original ad's line about Quiznos' pepper bar in her video's caption.