Finnish delivery platform Wolt has been on quite a journey since it was founded almost 11 years ago in Helsinki. The business now operates in more than 30 markets across Europe and Asia, and has continued to grow since its acquisition by US food delivery giant DoorDash back in mid-2022.
The business contributed to DoorDash achieving an advertising revenue run rate of over $1 billion in 2024 – a figure achieved across the markets that DoorDash Ads and Wolt Ads operate in. And, despite making this contribution under the DoorDash umbrella, Wolt very much continues to have a degree of autonomy.
“Even though we are leveraging their technology, we are still two different businesses. We’ve had to build a team to take all that piping and make it work for us. And, as you know, we’ve got GDPR and local regulations that we still need to ensure work locally. So, we have a lot of flexibility and autonomy in deciding how we pick up that infrastructure and how we deploy it,” says Catalina Salazar, Global Senior Director of Retail Media at Wolt.
“In our advertising product, we’ve had to build a lot of things that perhaps are not suited for the US business. For example, we still have our own machine learning team that takes all of our signals and processes them in a way that is relevant and meaningful for us. Because, if we would have taken the DoorDash approach, it wouldn’t really work.”
Within this approach, Wolt is consistently looking at how to deliver the best experience for both its merchants and its consumers, and considering whether this is something it can build itself. It has the freedom to customise its solution, picking “what works for our local teams and our markets,” according to Salazar.
Salazar dubs this “global power with local nuance.” Tools are introduced via a release schedule, and the business engages with its legal and product teams in each of the individual markets to ensure that the tool works for them and that regulations are being complied.
Sometimes, Wolt must also engage with consumer organisations, working “through a process of understanding what we need to change and changing it accordingly” to satisfy the needs of those organisations.
Knowing when to capitalise
When it comes to capitalising on the retail media opportunity, Salazar says “it was never a question of if, but of when.”
The business realised that, with the advent of GDPR, the general shift toward privacy, and cookies disappearing from browsers, it had the chance to build a platform that ensured “consumers were connecting with local economies in the right way,” helping particularly merchants who are unable to fund big marketing campaigns to “connect with the people that they need to keep their businesses alive,” according to Salazar.
“Luckily, that has resulted in something that merchants truly love, and we see it through the retention, engagement, and growth,” Salazar adds. “That is good for our business, because it’s being born out of the need of helping our customers and our brands connect, not so much profitability. But it’s meant that very quickly it’s becoming a meaningful pillar in the strategy of the company.”
Laying the foundations for success
Wolt’s ad business is made up of four pillars: data and insights for planning; bringing media off-app; in-app at the moment of purchase; and capitalising on offline assets like electric vehicles, bags, and sampling.
The second of those pillars is becoming increasingly important for Wolt, because “it’s the channel that helps you tell a story,” says Salazar. “On the app, at the moment of purchase, there’s not a lot of opportunity to convince someone that a product is the best. You have to do that storytelling elsewhere. So, for me, it’s super important that we enable a channel for that.”
Wolt had been developing its offsite proposition alongside its in-app strategy, however, GDPR meant that more work had to be done around the infrastructure for consent and privacy.
It’s now working with partners in some of its markets to test the proposition, acknowledging that it has to “what makes sense in each country, because Albania might have a very different media setup compared to Azerbaijan,” explains Salazar.
Alongside its offsite proposition, Wolt has recently launched its brand ads self-service, and has been in the process of alpha and beta testing with companies such as Unilever and Coca-Cola, as well as starting one-to-one relationships with media agencies.
While being excited about those developments, Salazar is also “super excited about the data and insights piece, because I think we’re in a really unique place to help brands uncover opportunities through data and now, with AI, it’s even easier and better.”
And this excitement extends to the wider industry, where Salazar sees “this retail media industry evolving into commerce media, with not only retailers and merchants leveraging their data, but also banks and airlines leaning in. It’s super exciting to see how everyone will now build capabilities to leverage data opportunities.”
