A brief Toast takeover that'll last all year
A peek inside the short-lived IRL restaurant ad campaign and associated content maxxing to come
Toast sponsored a real-world ad campaign last month in New York City. But if pedestrians blinked, they might have missed it.
The restaurant point of sale and payments company stuck its ads to windows of eight New York businesses, including Carmine’s in Times Square, H&H Bagels further uptown, and Radio Bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Front windows are prime real estate, so I was surprised — at first — to learn Toast had pulled it off.
But, Ben Howell, partner and director of operations at Radio Bakery, told me, “The ask was a pretty small lift.” The ad was up for about 36 hours, he said; Toast put it up after service one day and spent the next day capturing photos and time-lapse videos of the restaurant’s exterior. Then they took it down.
The Radio Bakery ad was part of a “built for busy” marketing campaign from the tech company, highlighting high-traffic, popular businesses and celebrating their success. “800 croissants a day,” the ad in the window said, “That’s how Radio Bakery does busy.”
“We weren’t concerned about how it would affect us or the space or the aesthetic,” Howell said. That’s probably because it was so short-lived.
“If it was going to be up for like a month … we would’ve asked for an astronomical amount of money,” he added.
Participating restaurants were compensated for their participation, Toast confirmed. Howell wouldn’t say on the record how much the company paid the bakery to briefly host the ad, nor what amount of money counts as “astronomical” in this scenario (though we’ve all heard some things).
“Operators who participated told us they were proud to be involved,” Kelly Esten, Toast’s chief marketer said over email.
Howell concurs. Plus, he said, “Being in a Toast ad is also advertising us.”
The ads have been down for a couple of weeks, but expect images and video from the campaign to show up all year across Toast’s digital channels and through partnerships with New York-based content creators. Toast complemented the windows with a weeklong sponsorship of Caper, the new, New York-based business-of-restaurants newsletter that over the last week has covered knife-sharpening truck and a shuttered Brooklyn bakery and industry awards drama and, most interestingly to this lapsed Catholic, a private club in Manhattan that hired priests to take confession during opening hours.
Toast doesn’t have plans to advertise at more restaurants in New York or elsewhere, though a rep for the company said they received positive feedback and “are thinking about that as we plan our next steps for the brand.”
I’d expect more like this.
“Something we didn’t fully anticipate? Operators who weren’t part of it started asking if they could get a window, too,” Toast’s Esten said.
My message to Toast restaurants: know your worth! The $17 billion tech company reports first-quarter earnings later this week.
