​Home of the Hotspots - Building brand love with a social-first docuseries​

Just Eat Takeaway (JET) is largely seen as a ‘traditional’ weekend takeaway option, and needed to open people up to new ordering moments throughout the week. The brand is also famed for its celeb-fronted campaigns, but cementing the brand as the food delivery service to satisfy all cravings takes more than a famous face. 

JET needed a strategy to showcase and celebrate the breadth of foodie hotspots available on the marketplace; the ‘local heroes’ that the company was built on, that are the backbone of its business to this day. 

So, to help local foodies fall in love with JET and all that it offers, we developed a campaign that appealed to more than just consumers’ taste buds, but their hearts and souls. Why? Because delicious food isn’t just about the ingredients, it’s about the love, skill, experience, and passion that goes into creating an amazing dish. 

With a neuroscience-led food strategy at its core and fronted by known foodies, the campaign features delicious close-ups of textures and ingredients, digs into the inspiration behind the dishes, and, of course, pays homage to the moment of pure bliss after the first bite.

Together, we set off on a culinary journey to reconnect the brand with its audience of restaurants and consumers in an authentic and endearing way. We created a social-first branded content docuseries revealing the stories of the unsung heroes cooking up a storm across the UK: Home of the Hotspots. 

Each episode of Home of the Hotspots celebrates the culinary creations that make various restaurants unique. When we were looking at what made these ‘local heroes’ special, one thing became clear and one insight we worked off is this idea that: food made with love and passion hits differently. Because food is deeply personal… it’s not simply what you put on the end of your fork. It's the emotion, energy and people that surround it. We wanted to capture that essence in our campaign, and these Local Heroes are at the heart of their communities across the UK. 

The campaign celebrates JET as the destination for the hottest meal ticket in every city and highlights the range of locally-loved spots across the UK. These small, typically independent restaurants have major influence in their communities, and it was our belief that elevating these stories would drive local order volume, helping to fight off competition, as well as help position JET as the food ordering service to satisfy any craving.

This campaign not only managed to achieve record watch times but like any good campaign it achieved a clear business impact, increasing orders for these local heroes. The five episodes garnered more than 14,5 million views and data from the first three episodes showed a 4% favourability increase and a 136% order boost.

Results

11.2M unique users reached in the first 5 weeks

69% skippable completion rate on Youtube (benchmark: 65%)

60s average watch time (benchmark: 10s)

136% order increase for the restaurants featured.