Who: DoorDash, with John St. for creative and strategy, Wavemaker for media, BlinkInk for animation, and SNDWRx for audio.
What: A new campaign for the food delivery service’s “Welcome to the Flavourhood” platform launched last fall.
When & Where: The campaign just launched, and will be in market through the rest of the quarter, running nationally on TV, online, print, radio and out-of-home.
Why: With a category like food delivery, consumers usually have multiple options literally at their fingertips thanks to the apps installed on their phone. “The only job that we as marketers have is trying to move people’s fingers by an eighth of an inch,” said John St.’s chief creative officer, Cher Campbell. “How are you possibly going to make people make that decision?”
For DoorDash, that has meant a heavy emphasis on its support of local neighbourhoods as the core of its brand positioning and communications. It was at the heart of the fall campaign, and remains the main message with the latest work. “It’s about bringing your neighbourhood alive through the different flavours and food that’s within it,” said Campbell. “Making you feel great about the food of your neighbourhood and the place that you live.”
How: Like the fall campaign, John St. worked with U.K. animation studio BlinkInk to portray food options available in local neighbourhoods. But unlike the fall, where the focus was on restaurants, this time it’s the food itself and the wide range of options available through DoorDash.
“We want to show the diversity of that neighbourhood, the diversity of the flavours you find in the neighbourhood, and bring food to the forefront,” said Campbell. The 60-second ad shows Karate kicking sashimi, bike-riding burgers and a meatball throwing an alley-oop to a rim-hanging donut.
The visuals are complemented by a spoken-word ode to local foods by Canadian poet Britta Badour, and original music by SNDWRX
Two brand campaigns in less than a year: DoorDash is a very agile, iterative, always-on kind of client, said Campbell. “The expectation is you are constantly putting something new out because you’re constantly making it better—versus a more typical client, that might say we’re going to do an ad once a year, and that’s going to be what our brand is for this year, and we look at our strategy next year.”
