Toby Espinosa, Vice President, DoorDash Ads, describes himself as the “steward” of DoorDash’s global ad organisation. A veteran of the company who will celebrate 11 years at DoorDash in July, Espinosa recalls that when he joined, the company had just 70 people and operated in four markets.
“My first job was to launch new markets,” he says. “I lived in the office on an air mattress and turned on new markets; that was my job.”
Espinosa launched DoorDash in Phoenix, Atlanta, and Vancouver during his first year, and then for the five years following that, led the company’s core restaurant business. In late 2020, Shanna Prevé, now DoorDash’s Chief Revenue Officer, joined the company as VP Enterprise Sales & Business Development, and alongside her, Espinosa started up DoorDash’s Ads business in 2021.
DoorDash is the parent company of Finnish quick delivery business Wolt, which it acquired in 2022, and UK quick delivery company Deliveroo, acquired in 2025; giving it a truly global reach with a presence in more than 40 international markets.
Espinosa describes his day-to-day responsibilities as “thinking about whether our ads business is hitting its current metrics [and] how we’ll hit our long-term commercial and customer objectives for the next five years. I tend to oscillate between those two things.” He also has a hand in shaping DoorDash’s leadership team and ensuring the right people are in senior roles.
As we spoke in DoorDash’s New York headquarters, the company was on the verge of launching a new ad format, ‘Spotlight’, which brings immersive video and display ads to the DoorDash homepage. In the wake of the news, Espinosa discussed how retail media creative enables brand storytelling, whether the customer funnel has really collapsed, and what excites him about the present moment in retail media.
The storytelling power of creative
The Spotlight ad format brings a large, eye-catching creative placement to the DoorDash homepage, giving brands more scope to showcase different visuals, either in the form of static display or as a short, visual-only dynamic product video.
“In a simple parlance, [Spotlight Ads] is a mid-funnel tactic,” says Espinosa. “But what it’s really doing in our ecosystem is educating an existing buyer to increase their purchase occasion with a new product.”
For example, a soft drink brand might use the ads to promote a new flavour that they’ve launched. Shoppers browsing DoorDash who were already familiar with the brand might not know about the new flavour, and so the larger creative canvas would give the brand space to tell a story about that flavour and communicate it to existing fans.
With so many different SKUs available on the DoorDash app, Espinosa points out one way that restaurants and CPGs can “make this overwhelming amount of information easier [for consumers] to absorb: you can invest in creative.”
He added that DoorDash’s ad operations team is “now basically turning into a creative studio” thanks to the ease of using LLMs to produce creative ideas so quickly.
Early tests of the new format have shown that customers click through at higher rates – with Spotlight ads garnering 2.5x greater clickthrough for restaurant brands versus DoorDash’s regular banner ads, as well as a 20% increase in new-to-merchant sales. CPG brands have so far enjoyed a 36% uptick in new-to-brand sales along with a 3.5x brand halo ROAS.
Is the funnel really collapsing – or are consumers seeking out more information than ever?
“I think a lot of folks say there’s going to be a collapse of the funnel with AI,” Espinosa noted. “I completely disagree.”
Rather, he considers that the increase of information available about all kinds of products has simply made consumers want to discover more things. “Brands will play an integral role in educating these new consumers,” he said.
However, Espinosa does fully agree that the customer journey has become exponentially more complex – a complexity that has been passed onto brands as they work to appear everywhere the consumer might be searching.
“Say I’m the owner [of a London restaurant] – I have about 25 things I’m supposed to be great at,” said Espinosa. “Buying Meta ads, buying ads on Pinterest, and OpenAI, and Snapchat – why do I have to be an expert?”
Recognising this complexity has led many retail media networks to invest in offsite so that brands can be present across a range of channels, all powered by the same retail data. In 2025, DoorDash acquired adtech platform Symbiosys to build out its offsite capabilities, encompassing paid search, social advertising, and display.
“What we’ve done is we’ve said, ‘Let’s collapse all of that complexity into one front door’,” said Espinosa. “Which allows … the brand to buy a single campaign across all these surfaces. It creates a simplified buying experience for the advertiser.”
Retail media is “critical” for businesses to survive and thrive
Espinosa reflected that what excites him about the present moment in retail media is that retail media is “critical” in a time when businesses, particularly local businesses, are “basically fighting to survive [and] continue to thrive”.
“When I think of retail media, I take our role [to be] not just creating our own retail media network for our customers, but I truly also think … we need to build tools to make everybody better,” he said.
He also predicts that measurement in retail media will undergo a rapid transformation over the next 12 to 18 months, with AI helping to provide “an enormous amount of incremental information” as organisations evaluate their success against different metrics.
Espinosa characterises quick delivery companies like DoorDash, Deliveroo and Wolt as “children of the mobile revolution”, given that mobile ordering from consumers – along with tablet and iPad order management by businesses – has made the entire model possible.
However, now, he believes that they also need to be “children of the AI revolution – and bring those same tools to every one of our customers to help local economies grow.”
Read more interviews with leading retail media figures on Retail Media Age.
