Jeff Low Personifies Delivery Bags in DDB’s First Work for DoorDash

DoorDash has launched its biggest Australian marketing campaign to date, and DDB ’s first work since LBB revealed it picked up the delivery service’s creative account in June.

Setting out to adapt DoorDash’s global positioning, ‘Your Door to More’, into a local platform, a series of films show DoorDash riders with chatty delivery bags at the rear of their bikes. The friendly bags – brought to life through animatronic puppetry from MEG – chat about everything from peeing in nappies to whether a dog is following them.

The snappy films featuring personality-packed creatures and a dry, Australian humour are directed by Jeff Low (who won a Cannes Grand Prix this year for Telstra’s ‘Better on a Better Network’, which is similar in its format, wit, and focus on creating small stories).

Speaking at a media briefing in Sydney yesterday, Michael Sinclair, head of brand performance at DDB Sydney, said DoorDash is a “really complicated business and a global leader, but in Australia is up against a behemoth [in Uber]. 

“When we got the brief, we actually had to step back and break down a lot of the assumptions we made about delivery and the role DoorDash had.”

Whilst around 34% of Australian adults are using one of DoorDash’s competitors at least once a month, Michael said the key insight was “a pretty self evident one.” 

“Delivery has become about instant gratification. I want that thing, I get that thing, I feel slightly guilty about that thing. If we're always honest about it, if you're ordering a soft serve ice cream from McDonald's, it feels like a pretty poor use of delivery. 

“But when you step back and you think about what our lives are like, delivery does something else that's really important. It reduces that mental load, that pressure we all have every day in a very cost efficient way. So we started to think about DoorDash as having an answer for this overlooked need, and delivery as being an investment in yourself.”

Madison Westall, head of brand at DoorDash ANZ, added the DoorDash team wanted to communicate its partnerships with other brands, making it clear “we have clear intentions to expand beyond restaurant.”

“We launched first with Coles in 2022, we've also had Afterpay exclusively since back then. The Amazon and Dan Murphy's partnerships launched late last year, and then this year has been wall to wall launches with Costco, Aldi, Chemist Warehouse, and Velocity all exclusively with DoorDash.

“We had so many launches that we were often just telling people that we launched something, and we hadn't really had an opportunity to create a really emotional connection. So we wanted to move from this transactional service space into a more valued and culturally relevant offering.”

DDB also works with Coles. Meanwhile, as the category heats up, Special leads Uber’s creative efforts and Thinkerbell works with Menulog. Uber’s Cher edition of its ‘Get Almost, Almost Anything’ platform will run until the end of the year, while Menulog recently launched a large-scale, AI-powered campaign championing local restaurants.

In a category full of paper delivery bag imagery, Matt Chandler, DDB Sydney’s chief creative officer, said the team wanted to “push away” from that, instead showing, “DoorDash is really out on the street constantly working for Australians, helping them get through the day.”

In the new campaign, the delivery bags “are the voice of the brand,” Matt said, and the brand’s  distinctive brand asset is switched from the paper bag to the Dasher backpacks.

“[They] gave us this beautiful way to tell stories and really get to know these characters. It's a really diverse range of voices that tell all these stories. 

“The development of the characters was really crucial to the process. You could create these characters, and they could say anything – they could just spout out retail offers, but they needed to feel like real, lived-in people, so that you would love them.”

One of the biggest challenges was casting the voices. 

“We went through hundreds of different voices,” Matt laughed. “There was the funny thing of seeing one voice coming out of a bag, you think, ‘Actually, that voice doesn't feel like it could be a bag.’”

Another discussion was what, exactly, the bags know about the world they inhabit.

“They have this really specific worldview. They only know what they know and what their lives are. It sort of plays out like a workplace comedy, where it's just about their day-to-day working life, and what they get up to,” said Matt.

The last bit of the puzzle was the endframe’s music – a steel drum cover band’s rendition of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P.

“I don't think that was on our bingo card of where we thought we'd end up with the music,” Matt added. “But we heard that he loves them. It's weird to think that 50 Cent has actually watched these ads.”

Throughout the 13 films, the bags and their riders show up in all sorts of environments – from regional to inner city. Michael said whilst competitors had “built this caricature, music video world,” an Australian watching the DoorDash campaign should “feel like the country they're living in is being picked up in an advertising campaign.”

“What we wanted to do was make people feel good about the Australia they’re in, and that DoorDash is part of that.”

Working with Wavemaker for media, Madison said the films will run in rotation “because we feel like they're so much stronger as a suite.”

“I have that hope in my heart that people start to look forward to these and find them funny, and then when they see a new one, they're like, ‘Oh, I haven't seen that one before’. 

“We feel that because we have such a broad offering, we didn't want to make an ad where we were trying to do eight things in one ad. We just wanted to put forward what we had through little vignettes.”