Cousins Subs
A full-funnel digital campaign built around what makes Cousins different, designed to drive brand awareness at the top and convert hungry, high-intent customers at the bottom.
Role Executive Creative Director & Brand Strategist
Client Cousins Subs
Timeline One year
The Challenge
Cousins Subs operates in one of the most competitive categories in fast casual, a space where every brand is promising fresh, quality ingredients and a better sandwich. The challenge wasn't just performance across digital channels. It was standing out creatively in a way that felt true to what Cousins actually offers, and converting that differentiation into measurable sales growth.
The goal: build a full-funnel strategy that drove brand discovery at scale while capturing high-intent customers at the moment they were ready to act.
The Idea
As Executive Creative Director, I built the campaign around Cousins' genuine differentiators, the things competitors simply can't claim. Four flavors of bread baked in-house daily, and sides that actually earn attention: fries, cheese curds, the kind of menu items that make a lunch decision feel like a real choice rather than a default.
Rather than leaning on generic food marketing tropes, beauty shots of ingredients, sweeping lifestyle visuals, the creative strategy centered on specificity. These aren't just subs. They're made-to-order, with bread that doesn't exist anywhere else on the block. That became the creative foundation for everything across the funnel.
Creative Development
I led full on-site productions to capture both photography and video content built to flex across the entire funnel. Every asset was developed with performance in mind, ensuring the work could scale across paid social, search, and Performance Max while maintaining a cohesive visual identity and consistent brand voice.
The result was a versatile creative library that gave Cousins a consistent visual presence across every channel, with messaging that could adapt to match where a customer was in the decision process without ever feeling like a different brand.
Full-Funnel Execution
The campaign operated in two distinct layers, each built for its job in the funnel.
At the top, Meta static and video drove brand awareness, introducing Cousins to new audiences and putting the freshness and quality of the food front and center. These were the ads that made people think about Cousins before they were hungry, so that when hunger hit, Cousins was already in the consideration set.
At the bottom, a combination of static, carousel, and video content across paid search met high-intent customers at the moment of decision, reinforcing the differentiators, showcasing the menu, and giving people a clear, compelling reason to choose Cousins over whatever else was a click away.
Impact
37M+ impressions. 200,000+ purchases.
In 2025, the campaign proved that specific, differentiation-led creative doesn't just build brand equity, it converts. When the work is rooted in what's genuinely ownable, the funnel takes care of itself.