DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the US, has been gradually growing its international footprint, recently announcing it would be entering the UK market via an acquisition of Deliveroo. But where the business is, arguably, seeing its most interesting developments is within its ads business.
The company claims to be the fastest retail media platform in history to hit over $1 billion in advertising revenue run rate, achieving the figure across the more than 30 markets DoorDash and Wolt Ads operate in.
“We are the fastest growing retail media network to ever reach a billion-dollar run rate in ads revenue. So, we’re already on our way to being a pretty significant player in the retail media space,” says Peter Giordano, Senior Director of Platform & Growth Services at DoorDash.
“Secondly, everything we do as an ads business ties back to the core mission of DoorDash. Forget about ads for a second. The core mission of DoorDash is to empower and grow local economies. We built an ads business on top of that to continue to do that for our merchant partners and for our brands. So, our goal as an ads business is to become the marketing platform for the local economy.”
This desire to represent local businesses led to the platform recently overhauling its Ads business, with the introduction of AI-powered tools to help SMB restaurant merchants to create and target campaigns, as well as the introduction of new creative visual formats for brands, such as video, display images, and product carousels.
While AI will play a big part in creating campaigns for merchant partners, DoorDash is also adamant that this won’t come at the detriment of what is produced by its in-house creative studio, Superette.
“Everything we want to do is to take the burden off of our advertiser,” says Giordano. “Remove the thought from our advertisers when they want us to be their one-stop shop. That could mean creative. It could mean media planning. It could mean defining their target. It could mean giving them rapid, real-time, instant insights and reporting on how their campaigns are doing. Recommendations of what else they should do to optimise those campaigns. Rapidly optimising through our Smart Targeting and our Smart Campaigns to show you this type of promo and you this type of promo, and then layer in an ad for you, because that’s what our platform has decided is most effective. Maybe the ad we’re layering in for you was created by Superette, our in-house agency.”
The key focus of DoorDash Ads’ AI tools is SMB advertisers, as opposed to the CPGs and enterprise brands, because they tend not to have marketing teams.
Giordano added: “They’re literally running a restaurant. They’re worried about making payroll at the end of the month. They’re making sure they’ve got enough chicken in the freezer. The last thing they need to worry about is: what target should I use? And how do I create an Instagram ad? Take that off of their plate. Let us grow their sales, so they can actually do what they’re good at, which is running their business.”
DoorDash has also added Symbiosys – an offsite retail media platform – to its roster. Symbiosys enables advertisers to run campaigns across search, social, and display. As a result, brands on DoorDash will be able reach consumers outside of the DoorDash app.
The acquisition extends the work DoorDash has done in securing partnerships with Topsort and The Trade Desk. Symbiosys represents offsite, Topsort represents retailers’ first-party sites, and The Trade Desk represents open web and programmatic display and CTV.
“Every single one of those partnerships has been designed for the purpose of making sure that we can continue to serve our advertisers, which means reaching customers wherever they’re spending their time,” explains Giordano.
“We could make 20 partnerships. We haven’t. We’ve strategically chosen partners that we think fill a need for our advertisers, and that we can work collaboratively with to make sure that we’re filling that need and continuing to allow our advertisers to go further up funnel, reach new customers, attract new customers, and hit them at different moments of need and different moments of consideration,” he concludes.
