Is Uber Eats Swayed By Competitor Campaigns? “Oh Hell No”

Andy Morley isn’t worried about competitors like DoorDash and Menulog poking fun at Uber Eats.

Asked by a member of the SXSW Sydney audience about the challengers that take aim at the market leader for using celebrity cameos, the APAC director of marketing said, “I love it. I also love the fact that I think it was a DoorDash ad and you thought it was Menulog. 

“But both are very forgettable,” he joked. 

“Kudos to them ... you should do some bold, risky things like that. As a market leader, we shouldn't enter that conversation, because we'd be giving them fuel to give them more impact on it. As a challenger brand, you can do some tricky things that we might actually do if we were a challenger brand in other markets.

“Does that actually impact our approach to wanting to use celebrities in our ads? Oh, hell no.”

Uber Eats’ iconic and widely-awarded brand platforms such as ‘Tonight I’ll Be Eating’ and ‘Get Almost, Almost Anything’ are renowned for their use of celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Victoria and David Beckham. The most recent work from creative agency partner Special starred Jason Alexander ordering canned laughter through the app.

“We've seen the impact of the ROI of being bold with that creative over time, and we've seen the impact where we haven't been bold enough, and it's drastically different,” Andy said of the brand-building job the work is doing. 

“So I love the fact that they're [DoorDash and Menulog] taking that positioning. I think it's fun, but we're not going to enter into it.”

Andy was speaking on the SXSW Sydney stage alongside Special’s head of strategy Celia Garforth, plus Arnott’s chief marketing officer Jenni Dill and Saatchi & Saatchi managing director Toby Aldred. 

Jenni - who was previously CMO at McDonald’s - noted that work which focuses on competitors attracts column inches “in the industry press, and they get the industry talking about it, but most consumers don't care.”

Uber Eats’ shift away from a performance marketing focus and towards brand marketing is working, Andy said. As a Silicon Valley company, Uber “was very performance marketing driven.”

“They believed it [performance marketing] so much that as we were scaling up as a business, they just kept on piling more and more money into performance marketing, and it kept on spitting out an ROI,” he explained.

“There were flaws in the measurement, and there's only so much you can do, especially as you scale at ridiculous levels. 

“We started to put in better measurement systems, and all of a sudden, the love of performance marketing shifted completely. That brought a level of scepticism around performance, at the same time that we started to launch the first Uber Eats brand campaign in Australia, which was the first one that really saw the dial move.”

Uber’s data science team is focused on striking the right balance between performance spend and brand spend, “but it's a very difficult business to get that measurement right, because we're so dynamic. We don't have stable baselines. We grow at ridiculous rates in certain markets for periods, and then it gets competitive. This is something that we're probably going to be on a journey on to try and continue to work out what that right balance is.”

Jenni claimed Arnott’s hasn’t had to make compromises between performance and brand, because its platform was tested for both effectiveness and efficiency. The brand asked, “Would it work quickly? And would it work for the long haul? 

“The tougher trade offs we had in all the things we weren't going to support. All the legacy things … we had to take a lot of those things and take the funds from that to do the other thing. There was a bit of internal resistance, but as soon as it started working, everyone could feel it, everyone could see it.”

Arnott’s shook up its brand platform in partnership with Saatchi and Saatchi in the midst of economic pressures forcing the brand to increase prices. Off the back of the revived work, Arnott’s grew its market share by 1.6 percentage points. In the most recent set of results, its gross profit ROI was $3.36, 24 months after the campaign first launxhed; the FMCG category average is $0.75.