Euphoria, Comfort and Pleasurable Pain: Behind the Postmates Ads That Visualise Your Brain on Food
Food evokes all manner of feels. Some, such as comfort, a feeling of home, or nostalgia, are somewhat obvious and universal. But the reality is that food is more than that, so deeply personal and influenced by the most intricately minute experiences that it can be difficult to explain said feels.
A new campaign, one that we really enjoy, from Postmates is helping to convey some of this. It’s called ‘This Is Your Brain on Food’ and was created by Mother in the USA. It spans short films, influencer partnerships, traditional OOH, and two commissioned OOH murals from LA artists to demonstrate the effects that certain foods - that Postmates can deliver - have on the human brain.
Because no food feeling is the same, Mother tapped different artists from Nexus Design Studio,the motion design division of production partner Nexus Studios, to create their interpretations of sushi, soup dumplings, BBQ and more via a series of animated films. Soundtree also created custom tracks for each films to further evoke each food’s feeling.
“We loved the idea that eating certain foods can trigger full-body experiences ranging from euphoria to comfort to even a kind of pleasurable pain (think Nashville hot chicken),” said David Kim, executive creative director at Postmates. “And that these could be summoned on demand through our app.”
To find out more about the campaign, LBB’s Addison Capper first spoke to Mother’s Biz Anderson (strategy), Hayley Hinkley (creative) and Maddie Rosenberg (creative), before following up with Nexus to get intel from each of the films’ creators on what inspired the way they presented each food.
First up, creative and strategic insight from Mother:
LBB> I like the play on words in 'This Is Your Brain on Food'. What initially inspired this approach and the rather cheeky play on language around the use of chemical reactions and, frankly, drugs?
Maddie Rosenberg> Food does more than satiate our hunger. It gives us distinct, visceral feelings. These are feelings we all intuitively know but don’t necessarily know how to describe. So, with this campaign, we sought to capture each food’s unique dopamine rush, pulling in all the sensory, emotional, and metaphorical elements evoked the moment you bite in.
LBB> What kind of research did you do around the emotion of eating and the science of how it affects you? What did you discover?
Biz Anderson> Our qualitative research was built off synesthetic thinking - encouraging sounds, colour, textures, and smells to come to the surface while actually eating these foods. While there was a lot of intentional, formal research, there were moments when we simply ate many delicious foods and talked about it.
LBB> I find the enjoyment of food is also so influenced by circumstances. Pasta tastes better in Italy, just like a hamburger hits differently in an American diner - to me, at least! Did this factor into how you thought about this campaign and briefed your animators?
Maddie Rosenberg> To accurately capture the feeling of each food, we first had to nail the context. Fried chicken at 2pm hits different than at 2am. We spent a lot of time identifying the most emotive context based on the foods Postmates delivers — sushi when you want to feel fancy, hot chicken when you need to feel alive, boba when you’re craving an afternoon pick-me-up.
LBB> Speaking of briefing the animators - how did you do so? How did you ensure you got the content you needed but also let their emotions shine through?
Hayley Hinkley> If I say ‘lasagna’, the first thing someone might say is ‘Italy’, and then ‘family’, and then ‘warmth’, and so on. The depth of the food worlds became more interesting once we broke through the initial associations. We wanted to give the animators a brief that got them past the obvious without suppressing their expression.
We created multiple mood boards for each food to capture everything from emotions to colours, textures, and even sounds. We walked our animators through our vision for these worlds while encouraging them to add their own experience of each food. The goal was to capture the universal truth of how food feels, which took a lot of collaboration.
LBB> Why were Nexus the perfect partners to help bring this campaign to life?
Hayley Hinkley> Nexus shared our intention to jump past cliche depictions of joy or flavour and dig into deeper, more insightful tensions behind each food’s feeling.
Maddie Rosenberg> We also worked with Soundtree to create custom tracks to capture each food’s feeling. We explored the melody, instrumentation, and tempo that felt like soup dumplings or hot chicken instead of attributing the foods to genres.
LBB> The murals are joyful too. How did you decide on the artists for these, and why was this type of OOH a perfect vehicle for the campaign?
Hayley Hinkley> We loved the idea of allowing more artists and creators to get in on the campaign and create their unique interpretations of how their favourite foods make them feel. There were two factors in play when choosing the right partners:
- Local artists representing local restaurants in their communities.
- People with trippy, abstract styles that could evoke the feeling of our foods.
LBB> What kind of food experiences have brought you particularly potent emotional experiences and why?
Biz Anderson> Often, food plays a quiet role in the background — a reason to gather, celebrate, or even ignore each other. But then there are times when you’re eating something so good, so delicious, that suddenly that specific type of food from a specific place IS the moment.
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Insight from Nexus Design Studio and the creators of each of the films:
Harry Butt - Creative Director
This was a major opportunity for Nexus Design Studio to show what it does best - a style-agnostic execution under a single creative direction. We curated a bespoke creative team for this project, which featured directors, animators, and designers, to breathe life into this collection. My goal was to immerse the audience in the personal moment of savouring the first bite of their favourite dish and the full range of experiences that come with it. We had 15 seconds to fit quite a lot in so we formed a consistent structure that worked with the ideas on composition very early on. We needed to include the introduction and supers, rising to a release moment as the main animation started. This built a strong foundation for each of the films.
Creating such a variety of stories centred not on traditional narratives but on abstract sensations was a process I thoroughly enjoyed. Initially, the challenge lay in identifying a universally abstract representation of experiencing different foods. There are certain aspects, like the sensation of spicy heat, that resonate with everyone. Personally, when I eat spicy food, my temples sweat and it feels like my forehead is crying. I thought about what would happen to this sweat at high speed (an idea that can be seen in the Nashville Hot Chicken film). This experience is very different in comparison to deciphering how indulging in sushi feels, and the accompanying state of mind from this experience would vary from person to person.
All in all, embracing the abstract nature of the task was precisely what appealed to me about this project, and it’s great to see the unique touch each of the creative team brought to every piece.
Soup Dumplings
Shynola: Chris Harding, Jason Groves, and Richard 'Kenny' Kenworthy
We made the spot for Soup Dumplings. Ours is a window into a cute, magical land where a character rides a steaming hot geyser of broth into the sky in a state of satiated bliss. We wanted to create a charming scene and avoid the style of typical CGI, so we used a mix of 3D and 2D techniques. For the opening shot, we carefully integrated the 3D characters and liquid effects made in Houdini, hand-painted clouds and animated 2D effects, which were all skilfully choreographed within a big sweeping camera move. The most difficult aspect was making all these strands combine harmoniously.
Designing the character and his little sidekick bird friend was joyous. We had a brilliant line-up of contenders, all of which would have been cool to animate, but refining the chosen design and bringing them to life was so gratifying - we all fell in love with the characters and wanted them as toys. If you’ve ever had a Soup Dumpling, you’ll recognise in this film the blissful moment when that firework of flavour goes off in your mouth. And if you’ve never had a Soup Dumpling you really, really need to.
Nashville Hot Chicken
Veronica Solomon & Gustaf Holtenäs
Veronica Solomon, Clay Animator> This film tells the story of Keith, a rather unremarkable motorcycle driver and his journey to becoming Diablo - the legendary flying biker, powered by the magic hot food he ate.
I was approached for this project, I assume, because of the samples of clay animations that I published on my social media channels. I have my very own way of animating clay, which is creating a painting-like effect on the surface by using several shades and colours, like brush strokes. For this project, I did what I do best, but the main challenge was telling a story through facial expressions. In the past, I avoided faces and concentrated on body expressions, so working with Nexus Design Studios pushed me out of my comfort zone and I’m very happy with the results. I’ve always envied people who can eat hot food, but now I know the torment and bliss they feel. I felt it with my fingertips.
Gustaf Holtenäs, Painter/Animation Director> I was tasked with painting the environment of the Nashville Hot Chicken spot. As part of my role, I animated the explosion in the sky and delivered a lot of concept sketches for different assets. With the creation of the background environment, I painted these by hand, with traditional paint and an airbrush. One of the challenges was making rocks that looked like fried chicken, which still maintained and fit the stylistic theme. I also hand-painted the large explosion in the sky before this was scanned into the computer for animation. It was a fun challenge due to the complexity of it but also because it looks so much better and rawer when made with paint on paper.
Boba Tea
Laurie Rowan
The Boba Tea film recreates the sensory experience of drinking a flavoursome boba tea. Set in its bubbly world, a boba-headed skater leads us through a high-paced transition into a bright and colourful boba overload, ploughing the viewer headfirst into full frontal refreshment.
The film was predominantly made using 3D CGI with 2D embellishments. The landscape was designed much like a videogame using a few variants of repeating assets to build out a large world. The whole environment was conformed to a cylinder to provide an endless vanishing horizon line so that we could phase details and control which aspects held centre stage at any given point and retain focus without drowning in auxiliary details. Timing was the biggest challenge with this project, as we wanted to convey a lot in a short amount of time. I enjoyed creating the individual transitions of the objects presented into their ‘bobafied’ form and choosing how they would be interpreted in this universe. Cars become large weightless bubbles and fire hydrants burst upward into rubbery hoses shooting bobas into the atmosphere. It was fun finding a unique function for each object which complemented its original form.
Sushi
Double Up Studio: Lina Reidarsdotter Källström and Louise Silfversparre
We’ve created a film that represents the luxurious feeling you get when eating really good sushi. We wanted to transport the viewer to an opulent place filled with colours and sparkle while keeping the overall atmosphere clean and fresh. The video consists of a variety of geometric shapes, and one challenge for us was to infuse a sense of organic playfulness into these uniform forms. We spent a lot of time getting the timings of the animations right and put a lot of effort into small details to have a video where the world and its tempo flow seamlessly.
It was a real highlight for us to be part of a team that was very passionate about animation and had knowledge of the artistry that goes into it. The production was truly a great collaboration - we had a lot of fun working on the look of our world and making the fish shapes come across as delicious little jewels.
BBQ
Shynola: Chris Harding, Jason Groves, and Richard 'Kenny' Kenworthy
A ravenous monster rips open the head and roars with hunger before taking a greedy swipe at the delicious meat with his claws.
We animated the monster traditionally but then employed a bespoke technique to mirror the look of a celluloid scratch film: the animation frames were organised into ‘contact sheets’ and printed onto paper. Each one was then painstakingly scratched onto sheets of acetate we had prepared with acrylic spray. Lastly, every acetate was fed into a super high-resolution scanner and recompiled into animation. It’s a convoluted process, during which you are working in the dark, but the result is totally authentic and is bursting with life because of it. We were so excited to see the animation from the scanned acetates playback for the first time.
If you’re a meat lover you can wholly identify with this monster - he’s not scary, he’s our spirit animal.
