Tony Pace, Former Subway Ad Executive Who Pushed TV Networks to Make ‘Brand Memories,’ Dies at 64
variety.comBrian Steinberg Senior TV EditorTony Pace, an advertising industry veteran who parlayed top jobs at two of Madison Avenue’s biggest agencies into a role at a major restaurant chain where he prodded TV networks to test new ways of weaving products into programming, has died.
He was 64 years old and was in a snowmobile accident Feb. 8 while visiting Montana for an Olympics-related hospitality event hosted by NBCUniversal.Pace was an advocate for doing more than just the usual kinds of advertising.
As chief marketing officer for the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust, Pace helped pay for the production of episodes of the NBC comedy spy series “Chuck”; was an early backer of creating advertiser-backed content for Hulu in the form of ten minute shorts called “The 4 to 9ers”; and even helped secure an entire scene about Subway sandwiches in the CBS drama “Hawaii Five-0.” He wanted viewers to talk about the sandwich chain as if they were speaking about the characters in the programs they tune in to see. “If the brand memory is really strong, those people are more likely to have an affinity for purchasing your brand,” he told Variety in 2015. “That’s what you are trying to create.” Over the course of a 40-year career, Pace held executive roles at the former Young & Rubicam and McCann Erickson, two large ad agencies owned, respectively, by WPP and Interpublic Group, where he worked with clients such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca-Cola and Capital One.
He was also a co-founder of Momentum, an Interpublic Group agency that focuses on experiential marketing.He joined Subway in 2006 and held the CMO role for about a decade.
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