Situation:

Parents have always been worried about children having too much screen time. Unfortunately, during the Covid pandemic, screen time inadvertently increased.

Meanwhile, Grab - Southeast Asia's leading superapp that provides everyday services - was also seeing a decline in food delivery orders caused by the pandemic.

Brief:

How can Grab turn the screen time predicament into a new source of food orders?

Objectives:

1. GENERATE NEW UNTAPPED SOURCE OF DEMAND FOR LOCAL FOOD DELIVERY - Preferably a new use case that could not be substituted by mum’s home-cooking

2. REVERSE SHORT-TERM DECLINE IN GRABFOOD USAGE DUE TO PANDEMIC, AND DO SO COST EFFICIENTLY GIVEN COVID BUDGET CUTS

3. REINFORCE GRAB’S LONG-TERM ADVANTAGE IN “ WIDE RESTAURANT SELECTION”

GrabFood Delivery Doodles turns children's doodles into real food orders with AI.

The child is given the opportunity to order their favourites, like ice cream, pizza, or cakes, simply by doodling them. The better the doodle, the better the chances of the AI recognising it. And the more time they spend doodling, the less time they spend passively watching videos or playing games.

27 ADDITIONAL ‘PARENTING HOURS’ EVERY WEEK

According to a Boston Consulting Group global survey1, parents with kids were spending an additional 27 hours each week on household chores, childcare, and education—nearly the equivalent of a second job—on top of their household responsibilities before the crisis.

Even before COVID-19 hit, working parents struggled to balance work and home life, but the pandemic just made a tough situation that much tougher. With schools and day-care centres closed, parents became full-time childcare providers and first-time math and science teachers, while simultaneously trying to conduct work meetings from home.

- 60% of survey respondents had no outside help in caring for and educating their children

Approach: Tell parents they can reduce their kids' screen time by letting the kids order their favourite food - simply by doodling it well.

Implementation & Scale:

GrabFood Delivery Doodles was launched in 3 countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Users accessed it directly on the Grab app.

Timeline:

It was launched on 1 June 2020 and ran for 6 weeks.

Placement:

100% MOBILE MEDIA BUYS.

We wanted a seamless experience for our users from seeing our communications to engaging with our AI and down to placing their GrabFood order. Our mobile-only budget is split 70:30 to optimise for:

1. Awareness of the campaign targeting parents and foodies via YouTube mobile ads. 

2. Retargeting Grab users using our CRM database on mobile search, mobile app & games and YouTube.

1. GrabFood Delivery Doodles was activated 1.4 million times in the 6 weeks of roll-out.

2. Generated USD914,897 worth of new food orders.

3. Benefitted 266 local small businesses in 3 countries with ZERO promo spend.

With high word of mouth compensating for small media spend and zero promo subsidy cost, we were not only able to reverse short-term decline but was also able to generate order demand more cost-efficiently than any other previous campaign.

Since we did not have a big media budget, we relied heavily on our owned media to help us get our users to try our Delivery Doodles A.I. The gateway to our A.I sit prominently on the landing page as soon as our users power-up our app. Besides that, we have also activated in-app push notifications to alert users of this new experience. Our owned media generated more than 80% of the total interaction sessions.